As he started across the floor toward the stairs, Prather straightened from his leaning posture.  For an instant his glance seemed to rest on Jack.  Indeed, eye met eye for a flash; and then Prather moved away.  His decision to go might easily have been the electric result of Jack’s own decision to join him.  Jack ran up the stairs.  At the head of the flight he saw, at half the distance across the floor, Prather’s back entering an elevator on the down trip.  He hurried forward, his desire to meet and speak with the man whose influence Jim Galway and Mary feared now overwhelming.

“Hello!” Jack sang out; and this to Prather’s face after he had turned around in the elevator.

In the second while the elevator man was swinging to the door, Jack and Prather were fairly looking at each other.  Prather had seen that Jack wanted to speak to him, even if he had not heard the call.  His answer was a smile of mixed recognition and satire.  He made a gesture of appreciative understanding of the distinction in their likeness by touching the mole on his cheek with his finger, which was Jack’s last glimpse of him before he was shot down into the lower regions of the store.

“He did it neatly!” Jack gasped, with a sense of defeat and chagrin.  “And it is plain that he does not care to get acquainted.  Perhaps he takes it for granted that I am not friendly and foresaw that I would ask him a lot of questions about Little Rivers that he would not care to answer.”  At all events, the only way to accept the situation was lightly, his reason insisted.  “Having heard about the likeness, possibly he came to the store to have a look at me, and after seeing me felt that he had been libeled!”

But his feelings refused to follow his reason in an amused view.

“I do not like John Prather!” he concluded, as he took the next elevator to the top floor.  “Yes, I liked Pete Leddy better at our first meeting.  I had rather a man would swear at me than smile in that fashion.  It is much more simple.”

The incident had had such a besetting and disagreeable effect that Jack would have found it difficult to rid his mind of it if he had not had a more centering and pressing object in prospect in the citadel of the push-buttons behind the glass marked “Private.”

John Wingfield, Sr. looked up from his desk in covert watchfulness to detect his son’s mood, and he was conscious of a quality of manner that recalled the returning exile’s entry into the same room upon his arrival from the West.

“Well, Jack,” the father said, with marked cheeriness, “I hear you have been taking a holiday.  It’s all right, and you will find motoring beats pony riding.”

“In some ways,” Jack answered; and then he came a step nearer, his hand resting on the edge of the desk, as he looked into his father’s eyes with glowing candor.

John Wingfield, Sr.’s eyes shifted to the pushbuttons and later to a paper on the desk, with which his fingers played gently.  He realized instantly that something unusual was on Jack’s mind.