"Yes, thank you, father—and when you didn't meet me—"
"I—I was very busy. I meant to, but something interrupted—I—" The father stopped, confounded by his own hesitation.
"Of course," said Jack. He spoke deferentially, understandingly. "I know how busy you always are."
Yet the tone was such to John Wingfield, Sr.'s ears that he eyed Jack cautiously, sharply, in the expectancy that almost any kind of undisciplined force might break loose from this muscular giant whom he was trying to reconcile with the Jack whom he had last seen.
"I thought I'd stretch my legs, so I came over to the store to see how it had grown," said Jack. "I don't interrupt—for a moment?"
He sat down on the chair opposite his father's and laid his faded cowpuncher hat and the rose on the desk. They looked odd in the company of the pushbuttons and the pile of papers in that neutral-toned room which was chilling in its monotony of color. And though Jack was almost boyishly penitent, in the manner of one who comes before parental authority after he has been in mischief, still John Wingfield, Sr. could not escape the dead weight of an impression that he was speaking to a stranger and not to his own flesh and blood. He wished now that he had shown affection on Jack's entrance. He had a desire to grip the brown hand that was on the edge of the desk fingering the rose stem; but the lateness of the demonstration, its futility in making up for his previous neglect, and some subtle influence radiating from Jack's person, restrained him. It was apparent that Jack might sit on in silence indefinitely; in a desert silence.
"Well, Jack, I hear you had a ranch," said the father, with a faint effort at jocularity.
"Yes, and a great crop of alfalfa," answered Jack, happily.
"And it seems that all the time you were away you have never used your allowance, so it has just been piling up for you."
"I didn't need it. I had quite sufficient from the income of my mother's estate."