“For good!  For good!  You!” The Doge stared at Jack in incomprehension.

“Yes, my future is out here, now.”

“You give up the store—­the millions—­your inheritance!” cried the Doge, still amazed and sceptical as he sounded the preposterousness of this idea to worldly credulity.

“Quite!”

There was no mistaking the firmness of the word.  “To make your fortune, your life, out here?”

The Doge’s voice was throbbing with the wonder of the thing.

“Yes!”

“Why?  Why?  I feel that I have a right to ask why!” demanded the Doge, in all the majesty of the moment when he faced John Wingfield, Sr. in the drawing-room.

“Because of a lie and what it concealed.  Because of reasons that may not be so vague to you as they are to me.”

“A lie!  Yes, a lie that came home!” the Doge repeated, while he passed his hand back and forth over his eyes.  The hand was trembling.  Indeed, his whole body was trembling, while he sought for self-control and to collect his thoughts for what he had to say to that still figure awaiting his words.  When he looked up it was with an expression wholly new to Jack.  Its candor was not that of transparent mental processes in serene philosophy or forensic display, but that of a man who was about to lay bare things of the past which he had kept secret.

“Sir Chaps, I am going to give you my story, however weak and blameworthy it makes me appear,” he said.  “Sir Chaps, you saw me in anger in the Wingfield drawing-room, further baffling you with a mystery which must have begun for you the night that you came to Little Rivers when we exchanged a look in which I saw that you knew that I recognized you.  I tried to talk as if you were a welcome stranger, when I was holding in my rancor.  There was no other face in the world that I would not rather have seen in this community than yours!

“How glad I was to hear that you were leaving by the morning train!  How I counted the days of your convalescence after you were wounded!  How glad I was at the news that you were to go as soon as you were well!  With what a revelry of suggestion I planned to speed your parting!  How demoralized I was when you announced that you were going to stay!  How amazed at your seriousness about ranching—­but how distrustful!  Yet what joy in your companionship!  At times I wanted to get my arms around you and hug you as a scarred old grizzly bear would hug a cub.  And, first and last, your success with everybody here!  Your cool hand in the duel!  That iron in your will which would triumph at any cost when you broke Nogales’s arm!  For some reason you had chosen to stop, in the play period of youth, on the way to the inheritance to overcome some obstacle that it pleased you to overcome and to amuse yourself a while in Little Rivers—­you with your steadiness in a fight and your airy, smiling confidence in yourself!”

“I—­I did not know that I was like that!” said Jack, in hurt, groping surprise.  “Was I truly?”