“Yes, Jack!” exclaimed John Wingfield, Sr., after a silence in which he seemed to be passing all that Jack had said in review.  “I am glad you have told me this; that you have come to the one to whom you should come in trouble.  You have made it possible for me to speak of something that I never found a way to speak about, myself.  For, Jack, you truly have been a stranger to me and I to you, thanks to the chain of influences which you have mentioned.”

Very slowly John Wingfield, Sr. had turned in his chair.  Distress was rising in his tone as he leaned toward Jack.  His face under the rim of light of the lamp had a new charm, which was not that of the indulgent or flattering or winning smile, or the masterful set of his chin on an object.  He seemed pallid and old, struggling against a phantom himself; almost pitiful, this man of strength, while his eyes looked into Jack’s with limpid candor.

“Jack, I will tell you all I can,” he said.  “I want to.  It is duty.  It is relief.  But first, will you tell me what your mother told you?  What her reasons were?  I have a right to know that, haven’t I, in my effort to make my side clear?” He spoke in direct, intimate appeal.

Jack’s lips were trembling and his whole nature was throbbing in a new-found sympathy.  For the first time he saw his father as a man of sensitive feeling, capable of deep suffering.  And he was to have the truth, all the truth, in kindness and affection.

“After you had left the house at Versailles,” said Jack, “she took me in her arms and said that you were my father.  ‘Did you like him?’ she asked; and I said no, realizing nothing but the childish impression of the interview.  At that she was wildly, almost hysterically, triumphant.  I was glad to have made her so happy.  ‘You are mine alone!  You have only me!’ she declared over and over again.  ’And you must never ask me any questions, for that is best.’  She never mentioned you afterward; and in all my life, until I was fourteen, I was never away from her.”

Again the palm of John Wingfield, Sr.’s hand ran back and forth over his knee and the foot that was against the chair leg beat a nervous tattoo; while he drew a longer breath than usual, which might have been either of surprise or relief.  His face fell back behind the rim of the lamp’s rays, but he did not turn it away as he had when Jack was talking.

“You know only the Jasper Ewold who has been mellowed by time,” he began.  “His scholarship was a bond of companionship for you in the isolation of a small community.  I know him as boy and young man.  He was very precocious.  At the age of eight, as I remember, he could read his Caesar.  You will appreciate what that meant in a New England town—­that he was somewhat spoiled by admiration.  And, naturally, his character and mine were very different, thanks to the difference in our situations; for the Ewolds had a good deal of money in those days.  I was the type of boy who was ready to work at any kind of odd job in order to get dimes and quarters for my little bank.