At last the cause of her exile was clear in all its grisly monstrousness; the source of the pain in her eyes in the portrait had been traced home.  Again he saw her white and trembling when she returned to the house in Versailles to find a visitor there; and now he realized the fulness of her relief when the frail boy said that he did not like his father.  Her travels had spoken the restlessness of flight in search of oblivion to the very fact of his paternity.  The “I give!  I give!” of the portrait was the giving of the infinity of her fine, sensitive being to him to make him all hers.  His feeling which had held him on the desert when he should have gone home, that feeling of literal revulsion toward his inheritance, was a thing born in him which had grown under her caresses and her training.  She had been living solely for him to that last moment when the book dropped out of her hand; and the incarnation of that which had killed her was riding beside him now in the flesh.  He felt a weaving of his muscles, a tightening of his nerves, as if waiting on the spark of will, and all the strength that he had built in the name of the store was madly tempted.  But no!  John Prather was not to blame, any more than himself.  He would listen to John Prather, as justice listens to evidence, and endure his stare to the end.

“Yes, your mother knew,” continued Prather.  “My mother made a point of having her know.  That was part of my mother’s own bitterness.  That was her teaching to me from the first.  She had no illusions.  She knew the advantages and the disadvantages of her position.  She was and is one of the few persons in the world of whom my father is a little afraid.”

“Then she still lives?” asked Jack sharply.

“Yes, she is in California,” Prather returned.  “She often referred to the mole on my cheek as the symbol of my handicap in the world of convention.  ‘But for the mole, Jack, you would have the store,’ she often said.  It delighted her that I had my father’s face.  As I grew older the resemblance became more marked.  I could see that I pleased my father with my practical ideas of life, which I developed when quite young.  He saw to it that my mother and I lived well and that I went to a good school.  From my books I drew the same lesson as from my peculiar inheritance; the lesson that my mother was always inculcating.  ‘A bank account,’ she would repeat, ’will erase even a mole patch on the cheek.  It is the supreme power that will carry you anywhere, Jack.  You must make money!’

“When father came to see her he would talk with a candor with which I am sure he never talked to your mother.  He would tell of his successes, revealing the strategy and system by which they were won, finding her both understanding and sympathetic.  I became a little blade that delighted to get sharp against his big blade by asking him questions.  He did not want me about the store, and this was one of the things in which my mother humored him.  She knew just when to humor and just when to threaten the play of the strong card which she always held.