“Why, no, Jack,” he said, reassuringly.  “If I had I shouldn’t have forgotten it, you may be sure.  And, well, Jack, there is no use of being sensitive about it, though I understand your indignation—­especially after he flaunted the fact of the resemblance in such a manner and refused to meet you.  From what I have heard about that fight with Leddy—­Dr. Bennington told me—­I can appreciate why he did not care to meet you.”  He laughed, more genially this time, in the survey of his son’s broad shoulders.  “I fear there is something of the old ancestor’s devil in you when you get going!” he added.

So his father had seen this, too—­what Mary had seen—­this thing born in him with the coming of his strength!

“Yes, I suppose there is,” he admitted, ruefully.  “Yes, I have reason to know that there is.”

His face went moody.  Any malice toward John Prather passed.  He was penitent for a feeling against a stranger that seemed akin to the dormant instinct that had made him glory in holding a bead on Pete Leddy.

“And I am glad of it!” said John Wingfield, Sr., with a flash of stronger emotion than he had yet shown in the interview.

“I am not.  It makes me almost afraid of myself,” Jack answered.

“Oh, I don’t mean firing six-shooters—­hardly!  I mean backbone,” he hastened to add, almost ingratiatingly.  “It is a thing to control, Jack, not to worry about.”

“Yes, to control!” said Jack, dismally.

He was hearing Ignacio’s cry of “The devil is out of Senor Don’t Care!” and seeing for the thousandth time Mary’s horrified face as he pressed Pedro Nogales against the hedge.  Now poise was all on the side of the father, who glanced away from Jack at the glint of the library cases in the semi-darkness in satisfaction.  But only a moment did the son’s absent mood last.  He leaned forward quivering, free from his spell of reflection, and his words came pelting like hail.  He was at grip with the phantoms and nothing should loosen his hold till the truth was out.

“Father, I could not fail to see the look on your face and the look on Jasper Ewold’s when you found him in the drawing-room!”

At the sudden reversal of his son’s attitude, John Wingfield, Sr. had drawn back into the shadow, as, if in defensive instinct before the force that was beating in Jack’s voice.

“Yes, I was startled; yes, very startled!  But, go on!  Speak everything that you have in mind; for it is evident that you have much to say.  Go on!” he repeated more calmly, and turned his face farther into the shadow, while he inclined his head toward Jack as if to hear better.  One leg had drawn up under him and was pressing against the chair.

Jack waited a moment to gather his thoughts.  When he spoke his passion was gone.