“The ancestor certainly must have been a snappy member of society in his time!  It has been delightful to have a look at him,” said John Prather, as he came out of the drawing-room.

He paused as he spoke.  He was still smiling.  The mole on his cheek was toward the stairway; and it seemed to heighten the satire of his smile.  The faces of the young man and the old man were close together and they were standing in much the same attitude, giving an effect of likeness in more than physiognomy.  That note of John Prather’s voice that had sounded so familiar to Jack was a note in the father’s voice when he was particularly suave.

“This is the end—­that is the understanding—­the end?” demanded John Wingfield, Sr.

“Oh, quite!” John Prather answered easily, moving toward the door.  He did not offer his hand, nor did John Wingfield, Sr. offer to take it.  But as he went out he said, his smile broadening:  “I hope that Jack makes a success with the store, though he never could run it as well as I could.  Good-by!”

“Good-by!” gasped John Wingfield, Sr.

He wheeled around distractedly and stood still, his head bowed, his fingers working nervously before his hands parted in a shrugging, outspread gesture of relief; then, his head rising, his body stiffening, once more his arbitrary self, he started up the stairs with the firm yet elastic step with which he mounted the flights of the store.

If Jack remained where he was they would meet.  What purpose in questions now?  The answer to all might be as false as to one.  He was no more in a mood to trust himself with a word to his father than he had been to trust himself with a word to John Prather.  He dropped back into the darkness of the dining-room and sank into a chair.  When a bedroom door upstairs had closed softly he was sequestered in silence with his thoughts.

His own father had lied to him!  Lied blandly!  Lied with eyes limpid with appeal!  And the supreme commandment on which his mother had ever insisted was truth.  The least infraction of it she would not forgive; it was the only thing for which she had ever punished him.  He recalled the one occasion when she had seemed harsh and merciless, as she said: 

“A lie fouls the mouth of the one who utters it, Jack.  A lie may torture and kill.  It may ruin a life.  It is the weapon of the coward—­and never be a coward, Jack, never be afraid!”

At the New England preparatory school which he had attended after he came home, a lie was the abomination on which the discipline of student comradeship laid a scourge.  Out on the desert, where the trails run straight and the battle of life is waged straight against thirst and fatigue and distance, men spoke straight.

And nothing had been explained, after all!  The phantom was back, definite of form and smiling in irony.  For it had a face, now, the face of John Prather!  How was he connected with the story of the mother? the father? the Doge?