“Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine,” was the younger Blount’s half-absent rejoinder.  But after the admission was made he qualified it.  “Perhaps I ought to say that he is as much a friend as his daughter will permit him to be.”

The qualifying clause was not thrown away upon the senator.

“What-all has the daughter got against you, son?” he asked mildly.

“Nothing very serious,” said Patricia’s lover, with a laugh which was little better than a grimace.  “It’s merely that she is jealous of any one who tries to share her father with her.  Next to her career—­”

“That’s Boston, isn’t it?” interrupted the ex-king of the cattle ranges.  Then he added:  “I’m right glad it hasn’t come in your way to tie yourself up to one of those ‘careers,’ Evan, boy.”

Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old “Circle-Bar” ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief love-tale, hiding nothing—­not even the hope that in the years to come Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration.  He felt better after he had told his father.  It was highly necessary that he should tell some one; and who better?

David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to the aging years.

“Think a heap of her, do you, son?” he said, when the ambling saddle-animals had covered another half-mile of the homeward journey.

“So much that it went near to spoiling me when she finally made me realize that I couldn’t hold my own against the ‘career,’” was the young man’s answer.  Then he added:  “I want work, father—­that is what I am out here for; the hardest kind of work, and plenty of it; something that I can put my heart into.  Can you find it for me?”

There was the wisdom of the centuries in the gentle smile provoked by this unashamed disappointed lover’s appeal.

“I wouldn’t take it too hard—­the career business—­if I were you, son,” said the wise man.  “And as for the work, I reckon we can satisfy you, if your appetite isn’t too whaling big.  How would a State office of some kind suit you?”

“Politics?” queried Blount, bringing his horse down to the walk for which his father had set the example.  “I’ve thought a good bit about that, though I haven’t had any special training that way.  The schools of to-day are turning out business lawyers—­men who know the commercial and industrial codes and are trained particularly in their application to the great business undertakings.  That has been my ambition:  to be a business adviser, and, perhaps, after a while to climb to the top of the ladder and be somebody’s corporation counsel.”

“But now you have changed your notion?”