“It’s not in the blood!”

The only sound was a slight tinkle of a spoon against the coffee-cup.  Looking at his father he saw a nervous flutter in his cheeks, his lips hard set, his brow drawn down; and the rigidity of the profile was such that Jack was struck by the shiver of a thought that it must have been like his own as others said it was when he had gripped Pedro Nogales’s arm.  But this passed quickly, leaving, however, in its trail an expression of shock and displeasure.

“So it was the girl, that kept you—­you were in love!” John Wingfield, Sr. exclaimed, tensely.

“Yes, I was—­I am!  You have it, father, the unchangeable all of it!  I face a wall of mystery.  ‘It’s not in the blood!’ she said, as if it were some bar sinister.  What could she have meant?”

In the fever of baffled intensity crying for light and help, he was sharing the secret that had beset him relentlessly and giving his father the supreme confidence of his heart.  Leaning across the table he grasped his father’s hand, which lay still and unresponsive and singularly cold for a second.  Then John Wingfield, Sr. raised his other hand and patted the back of Jack’s hesitantly, as if uncertain how to deal with this latest situation that had developed out of his son’s old life.  Finally he looked up good-temperedly, deprecatingly.

“Well, well, Jack, I almost forgot that you are young.  It’s quite a bad case!” he said.

“But what did she mean?  Can you guess?  I have thought of it so much that it has meant a thousand wild things!” Jack persisted desperately.

“Come! come!” the father rallied him.  “Time, time!”

He gripped the hand that was gripping his and swung it free of the table with a kindly shake.  All the effective charm of his personality which he never wasted, the charm that could develop out of the mask to gain an end when the period of listening was over, was in play.

“She excited the opposition of the strength in you,” he said.  “You ask what did she mean?  It is hard to tell what a woman means, but I judge that she meant that it was not in her blood to marry a fellow who went about fighting duels and breaking arms.  She would like a more peaceful sort; and, yes, anything that came into her mind leaped out and you were mystified by her strange exclamation!”

“Perhaps.  I suppose that may be it.  It was just myself, just my devil!” Jack assented limply.

“Time! time!  All this will pass.”

Jack could not answer that commonplace with one of his own, that it would not pass; he could only return the pressure when his father, rising and coming around the table, slipped his arm about the son in a demonstration of affection which was like opening the gate to a new epoch in their relations.

“And you would have killed Leddy!  You could have broken that Mexican in two!  I should like to have seen that!  So would the ancestor!” said the father, giving Jack a hug.