That sentence was enough. It would be as good as a volume to the powerful opposition in the House, hardly repressed heretofore by the Post's thunders. The reformatory, which they had labored for so long, was dead.

The thought was bitter to the young assistant secretary. But from the first, her mind had jumped beyond it, to fasten on another and, to her, far worse one, a burning personal question by the side of which the loss of the reformatory seemed for the moment an unimportant detail.

Which of the two men had done it?

Rev. Mr. Dayne was sitting bowed over his desk, his strong head clamped in his hands, the morning Post crumpled on the floor beside him. He did not look up when his assistant entered the office; his response to her "Good-morning" was of the briefest. Sharlee understood. It was only the corporeal husk of her friend that was seated at the desk. All the rest of him was down at Ephesus fighting with the beasts, and grimly resolved to give no sign from the arena till he had set his foot upon their necks for the glory of God and the honor of his cloth.

Sharlee herself did not feel conversational. In silence she took off her things, and, going over to her own desk, began opening the mail. In an hour, maybe more, maybe less, the Secretary stood at her side, his kind face calm as ever.

"Well," he said quietly, "how do you explain it?"

Sharlee's eyes offered him bay-leaves for his victory.

"There is a suggestion about it," said she, still rather white, "of thirty pieces of silver."

"Oh! We can hardly say that. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt, as long as there can be any doubt. Let us view it for the present as a death-bed repentance."

Him? Which did he mean?

"No," said Sharlee, "it is not possible to view it that way. The Post has been as familiar with the arguments all along, from beginning to end, as you or I. It could not be honestly converted any more than you could. This," said she, struggling to speak calmly, "is treachery."

"Appearances, I am sorry to say, are much that way. Still—I think we should not condemn the paper unheard."

"Then why not have the hearing at once? An explanation is—"

"I shall seek none," interrupted Mr. Dayne, quietly. "The Post must volunteer it, if it has any to offer. Of course," he went on, "we know nothing of the history of that editorial now. Of one thing, however, I feel absolutely certain; that is, that it was published without the knowledge of Mr. West. Developments may follow.... As for instance a shake-up in the staff."

That settled it. This good man whom she admired so much had not entertained a doubt that the editorial was from the brain and pen of Mr. Queed.

She said painfully: "As to the effect upon the—the reformatory—"

"It is killed," said Mr. Dayne, and went away to his desk.

Sharlee turned in her desk-chair and looked out of the rain-blurred windows.

Through and beyond the trees of the park, over ridges of roofs and away to the west and north, she saw the weatherbeaten Post building, its distant gray tower cutting mistily out of the dreary sky. From where she sat she could just pick out, as she had so often noticed before, the tops of the fifth-floor row of windows, the windows from which the Post's editorial department looked out upon a world with which it could not keep faith. Behind one of those windows at this moment, in all likelihood, sat the false friend who had cut down the reformatory from behind.

Which was it? Oh, was not Mr. Dayne right, as he always was? Where was there any room for doubt?

Long before Sharlee knew Charles Gardiner West personally, when she was a little girl and he just out of college, she had known him by report as a young man of fine ideals, exalted character, the very pattern of stainless honor. Her later intimate knowledge of him, she told herself, had fully borne out the common reputation. Wherever she had touched him, she had found him generous and sound and sweet. That he was capable of what seemed to her the baldest and basest treachery was simply unthinkable. And what reason was there ever to drag his name into her thought of the affair at all? Was it not Mr. Queed who had written all the reformatory articles since Colonel Cowles's death—Mr. Queed who had promised only twenty-four hours ago to do his utmost for the cause at the critical moment to-day?

And yet ... and yet ... her mind clung desperately to the thought that possibly the assistant editor had not done this thing, after all. The memory of his visit to her, less than a week ago, was very vivid in her mind. What sort of world was it that a man with a face of such shining honesty could stoop to such shabby dishonesty?—that a man who had looked at her as he had looked at her that night, could turn again and strike her such a blow? That Queed should have done this seemed as inconceivable as that West should have done it. There was the wild hundredth chance that neither had done it, that the article had been written by somebody else and published by mistake.

But the hope hardly fluttered its wings before her reason struck it dead. No, there was no way out there. The fact was too plain that one of her two good friends, under what pressure she could not guess, had consented to commit dishonor and, by the same stroke, to wound her so deeply. For no honest explanation was possible; there was no argument in the case to-day that was not equally potent a month ago. It was all a story of cajolery or intimidation from the formidable opposition, and of mean yielding in the places of responsibility. And—yes—She felt it as bad for one of her two friends to be so stained as another. It had come to that. At last she must admit that they stood upon level ground in her imagination, the nameless little Doctor of two years back side by side with the beau ideal of all her girlhood. One's honor was as dear to her as another's; one's friendship as sweet; and now one of them was her friend no more.

And it was not West whom she must cast out. There was no peg anywhere to hang even the smallest suspicion of him upon. She scourged her mind for seeking one. It was Queed who, at the pinch, had broken down and betrayed them with a kiss: Queed, of the obscure parentage, dubious inheritance, and omitted upbringing; Queed, whom she had first stood upon his feet and started forward in a world of men, had helped and counseled and guided, had admitted to her acquaintance, her friendship—for this.

But because Sharlee had known Queed well as a man who loved truth, because the very thing that she had seen and most admired in him from the beginning was an unflinching honesty of intellect and character, because of the remembrance of his face as she had last seen it: a tiny corner of her mind, in defiance of all reason, revolted against this condemnation and refused to shut tight against him. All morning she sat at her work, torn by anxiety, hoping every moment that her telephone might ring with some unthought-of explanation, which would leave her with nothing worse upon her mind than the dead reformatory. But though the telephone rang often, it was never for this.

* * * * *

Sitting in a corner of the House gallery, about noon, Mr. Dayne saw the reformatory bill, which he himself had written, called up out of order and snowed under. The only speech was made by the Solon who had the bill called up, a familiar organization wheelhorse, named Meachy T. Bangor, who quoted with unconcealed triumph from the morning's Post, wholly ignoring all the careful safeguards and tearing out of the context only such portions as suited his humor and his need. Mr. Bangor pointed out that, inasmuch as the "acknowledged organ" of the State Department of Charities now at length "confessed" that the reformatory had better wait two years, there were no longer two sides to the question. Many of the gentleman's hearers appeared to agree with him. They rose and fell upon the bill, and massacred it by a vote of 54 to 32.

From "Sis" Hopkins, legislative reporter of the Post, the news went skipping over the telephone wire to the editorial rooms, where the assistant editor, who received it, remarked that he was sorry to hear it. That done, the assistant hung up the receiver, and resumed work upon an article entitled "A Constitution for Turkey?" He had hardly added a sentence to this composition before West came in and, with a cheery word of greeting, passed into his own office.

The assistant editor went on with his writing. He looked worn this morning, Henry Surface's son, and not without reason. Half the night he had shared the nurse's vigil at the bedside of Surface, who lay in unbroken stupor. Half the night he had maintained an individual vigil in his own room, lying flat on his back and staring wide-eyed into the darkness. And on the heels of the day, there had come new trouble for him, real trouble, though in the general cataclysm its full bearings and farther reaches did not at once come home to him. Running professionally through the Post at breakfast-time, his eye, like Miss Weyland's, had been suddenly riveted by that paper's remarks upon the reformatory.... What was the meaning of the staggering performance he had no idea, and need not inquire. Its immediate effect upon his own career was at least too plain for argument. His editorship and his reformatory had gone down together.

Yet he was in no hurry now about following West into his sanctum. Of all things Queed, as people called him, despised heroics and abhorred a "scene." Nothing could be gained by a quarrel now; very earnestly he desired the interview to be as matter-of-fact as possible. In half an hour, when he had come to a convenient stopping-place, he opened the door and stood uncomfortably before the young man he had so long admired.

West, sitting behind his long table, skimming busily through the paper with blue pencil and scissors, looked up with his agreeable smile.

"Well! What do you see that looks likely for—What's the matter? Are you sick to-day?"

"No, I am quite well, thank you. I find very little in the news, though. You notice that a digest of the railroad bill is given out?"

"Yes. You don't look a bit well, old fellow. You must take a holiday after the legislature goes. Yes, I'm going to take the hide off that bill. Or better yet—you. Don't you feel like shooting off some big guns at it?"

"Certainly, if you want me to. There is the farmers' convention, too. And by the way, I'd like to leave as soon as you can fill my place."

West dropped scissors, pencil, and paper and stared at him with dismayed amazement. "Leave! Why, you are never thinking of leaving me!"

"Yes. I'd—like to leave. I thought I ought to tell you this morning, so that you can at once make your plans as to my successor."

"But my dear fellow! I can't let you leave me! You've no idea how I value your assistance, how I've come to lean and depend upon you at every point. I never dreamed you were thinking of this. What's the matter? What have you got on your mind?"

"I think," said Queed, unhappily, "that I should be better satisfied off the paper than on it."

"Why, confound you—it's the money!" said West, with a sudden relieved laugh. "Why didn't you tell me, old fellow? You're worth five times what they're paying you—five times as much as I am for that matter—and I can make the directors see it. Trust me to make them raise you to my salary at the next meeting."

"Thank you—but no, my salary is quite satisfactory."

West frowned off into space, looking utterly bewildered. "Of course," he said in a troubled voice, "you have a perfect right to resign without saying a word. I haven't the smallest right to press you for an explanation against your will. But—good Lord! Here we've worked together side by side, day after day, for nearly a year, pretty good friends, as I thought, and—well, it hurts a little to have you put on your hat and walk out without a word. I wish you would tell me what's wrong. There's nothing I wouldn't do, if I could, to fix it and keep you."

The eyes of the two men met across the table, and it was Queed's that faltered and fell.

"Well," he said, obviously embarrassed, "I find that I am out of sympathy with the policy of the paper."

"Oh-h-ho!" said West, slowly and dubiously. "Do you mean my article on the reformatory?"

"Yes—I do."

"Why, my dear fellow!"

West paused, his handsome eyes clouded, considering how best he might put the matter to overcome most surely the singular scruples of his assistant.

"Let's take it this way, old fellow. Suppose that my standpoint in that article was diametrically wrong. I am sure I could convince you that it was not, but admit, for argument's sake, that it was. Do you feel that the appearance in the paper of an article with which you don't agree makes it necessary for you, in honor, to resign?"

"No, certainly not—"

"Is it that you don't like my turning down one of your articles and printing one of my own instead? I didn't know you objected to that, old fellow. You see—while your judgment is probably a hanged sight better than mine, after all I am the man who is held responsible, and I am paid a salary to see that my opinions become the opinions of the Post."

"It is entirely right that your opinions—"

"Then wherein have I offended? Be frank with me, like a good fellow, I beg you!"

Queed eyed him strangely. Was the editor's inner vision really so curiously astigmatic?

"I look at it this way," he said, in a slow, controlled voice. "The Post has said again and again that this legislature must establish a reformatory. That was the burden of a long series of editorials, running back over a year, which, as I thought, had your entire approval. Now, at the critical moment, when it was only necessary to say once more what had been said a hundred times before, the Post suddenly turns about and, in effect, authorizes this legislature not to establish the reformatory. The House killed the bill just now. Bangor quoted from the Post editorial. There can be no doubt, of course, that it turned a number of votes—enough to have safely carried the bill."

West looked disturbed and unhappy.

"But if we find out that this legislature is so drained by inescapable expenses that it simply cannot provide the I money? Suppose the State had been swept by a plague? Suppose there was a war and a million of unexpected expenses had suddenly dropped on us from the clouds? Wouldn't you agree that circumstances altered cases, and that, under such circumstances, everything that was not indispensable to the State's existence would have to go over?"

Queed felt like answering West's pepper-fire of casuistry by throwing Eva Bernheimer at his head. Despite his determination to avoid a "scene," he felt his bottled-up indignation rising. A light showed in his stone-gray eyes.

"Can't you really see that these circumstances are not in the least like those? Did you do me the courtesy to read what I wrote about this so-called 'economy argument' last night?"

"Certainly," said West, surprised by the other's tone. "But clever as it was, it was not based, in my opinion, on a clear understanding of the facts as they actually exist. You and I stay so close inside of four walls here that we are apt to get out of touch with practical conditions. Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to get new facts, from a confidential and highly authoritative source. In the light of these—I wish I could explain them more fully to you, but I was pledged to secrecy—I am obliged to tell you that what you had written seemed to me altogether out of focus, unfair, and extreme."

"Did you get these facts, as you call them, from Plonny Neal?"

"As to that, I am at liberty to say nothing."

Queed, looking at him, saw that he had. He began to feel sorry for West.

"I would give four hundred and fifty dollars," he said slowly—"all the money that I happen to have—if you had told me last night that you meant to do this."

"I am awfully sorry," said West, with a touch of dignity, "that you take it so hard. But I assure you—"

"I know Plonny Neal even better than you do," continued Queed, "for I have known him as his social equal. He is laughing at you to-day."

West, of course, knew better than that. The remark confirmed his belief that Queed had brooded over the reformatory till he saw everything about it distorted and magnified.

"Well, old fellow," he said, without a trace of ill-humor in his voice or his manner, "then it is I he is laughing at—not you. That brings us right back to my point. If you feel, as I understand it, that the Post is in the position of having deserted its own cause, I alone am the deserter. Don't you see that? Not only am I the editor of the paper, and so responsible for all that it says; but I wrote the article, on my own best information and judgment. Whatever consequences there are," said West, his thoughts on the consequences most likely to accrue to the saviour of the party, "I assume them all."

"A few people," said Queed, slowly, "know that I have been conducting this fight for the Post. They may not understand that I was suddenly superseded this morning. But of course it isn't that. It is simply a matter—"

"Believe me, it can all be made right. I shall take the greatest pleasure in explaining to your friends that I alone am responsible. I shall call to-day—right now—at—"

"I'm sorry," said Queed, abruptly, "but it is entirely impossible for me to remain."

West looked, and felt, genuinely distressed. "I wish," he said, "the old reformatory had never been born"; and he went on in a resigned voice: "Of course I can't keep you with a padlock and chain, but—for the life of me, I can't catch your point of view. To my mind it appears the honorable and courageous thing to correct a mistake, even at the last moment, rather than stand by it for appearance's sake."

"You see I don't regard our principles as a mistake."

But he went back to his office marveling at himself for the ease with which West had put him in the wrong.

For friendship's sake, West had meant to call at the Charities Department that day, and explain to his two friends there how his sense of responsibility to the larger good had made it necessary for him to inflict a momentary disappointment upon them. But this disturbing interview with his assistant left him not so sure that an immediate call would be desirable, after all. At the moment, both Dayne and the dearest girl in the world would naturally be feeling vexed over the failure of their plan; wouldn't it be the sensible and considerate thing to give them a little time to conquer their pique and compose themselves to see facts as they were?

The Chronicle that afternoon finally convinced him that this would be the considerate thing. That offensive little busybody, which pretended to have been a champion of "this people's institution" came out with a nasty editorial, entitled "The Post's Latest Flop." "Flop" appeared to be an intensely popular word in the Chronicle office. The article boldly taxed "our more or less esteemed contemporary" with the murder of the reformatory, and showed unpleasant freedom in employing such phrases as "instantaneous conversion," "treacherous friendship," "disgusting somersaulting," and the like. Next day, grown still more audacious, it had the hardihood to refer to the Post as "The Plonny Neal organ."

Now, of course, the reformatory had not been in any sense a burning public "issue." Measures like this, being solid and really important, seldom interest the people. There was not the smallest popular excitement over the legislature's conduct, or the Post's. The Chronicle's venomous remarks were dismissed as the usual "newspaper scrap." All this West understood perfectly. Still, it was plain that a few enthusiasts, reformatory fanatics, were taking the first flush of disappointment rather hard. For himself, West reflected, he cared nothing about their clamor. Conscious of having performed an unparalleled service to his party, and thus to his State, he was willing to stand for a time the indignation of the ignorant, the obloquy of the malicious, even revolt and disloyalty among his own lieutenants. One day the truth about his disinterested patriotism would become known. For the present he would sit silent, calmly waiting at least until unjust resentment subsided and reason reasserted her sway.

Many days passed, as it happened, before West and the Secretary of Charities met; six days before West and the Assistant Secretary met. On the sixth night, about half-past seven in the evening, he came unexpectedly face to face with Sharlee Weyland in the vestibule of Mrs. Byrd, Senior's, handsome house. In the days intervening, Sharlee's state of mind had remained very much where it was on the first morning: only now the tiny open corner of her mind had shrunk to imperceptible dimensions. Of West she entertained not the smallest doubt; and she greeted him like the excellent friend she knew him to be.

There was a little dinner-dance at Mrs. Byrd's, for the season's debutantes. It became remembered as one of the most charming of all her charming parties. To the buds were added a sprinkling of older girls who had survived as the fittest, while among the swains a splendid catholicity as to age prevailed. A retinue of imported men, Caucasian at that, served dinner at six small tables, six at a table; the viands were fashioned to tickle tired epicures; there was vintage champagne such as kings quaff to pledge the comity of nations; Wissner's little band of artists, known to command its own price, divinely mingled melody with the rose-sweetness of the air. West, having dined beautifully, and lingered over coffee in the smoking-room among the last, emerged to find the polished floors crowded with an influx of new guests, come to enliven the dance. His was, as ever, a Roman progress; he stopped and was stopped everywhere; like a happy opportunist, he plucked the flowers as they came under his hand, and gayly whirled from one measure to another. So the glorious evening was half spent before, in an intermission, he found himself facing Sharlee Weyland, who was uncommonly well attended, imploring her hand for the approaching waltz.

Without the smallest hesitation, Sharlee drew her ornamental pencil through the next name on her list, and ordered her flowers and fan transferred from the hands of Mr. Beverley Byrd to those of Mr. Charles Gardiner West.

"Only," said she, thinking of her partners, "you'll have to hide me somewhere."

With a masterful grace which others imitated, indeed, but could not copy, West extricated his lady from her gallants, and led her away to a pretty haven; not indeed, to a conservatory, since there was none, but to a bewitching nook under the wide stairway, all banked about with palm and fern and pretty flowering shrub. There they sat them down, unseeing and unseen, near yet utterly remote, while in the blood of West beat the intoxicating strains of Straus, not to mention the vintage champagne, to which he had taken a very particular fancy.

All night, while the roses heard the flute, violin, bassoon, none in all the gay company had been gayer than Sharlee. Past many heads in the dining-room, West had watched her, laughing, radiant, sparkling as the wine itself, a pretty little lady of a joyous sweetness that never knew a care. In the dance, for he had watched her there, too, wondering, as she circled laughing by, whether she felt any lingering traces of pique with him, she had been the same: no girl ever wore a merrier heart. But a sudden change came now. In the friendly freedom of the green-banked alcove, Sharlee's gayety dropped from her like a painted mask, which, having amused the children, has done its full part. Against the back of the cushioned settle where they sat she leaned a weary head, and frankly let her fringed lids droop.

At another time West might have been pleased by such candid evidences of confidence and intimacy, but not to-night. He felt that Sharlee, having advertised a delightful gayety by her manner, should now proceed to deliver it: it certainly was not for tired sweetness and disconcerting silences that he had sought this tete-a-tete. But at last his failure to arouse her on indifferent topics became too marked to be passed over; and then he said in a gentle voice:—

"Confess, Miss Weyland. You're as tired as you can be."

She turned her head, and smiled a little into his eyes. "Yes—you don't mind, do you?"

"Indeed I do, though! You're going altogether too hard—working like a Trojan all day and dancing like a dryad all night. You'll break yourself down—indeed you will!"

Hardly conscious of it herself, Sharlee had been waiting with a tense anxiety of which her face began to give signs, for him to speak. And now she understood that he would not speak; and she knew why.... How her heart warmed to him for his honorable silence in defense of his unworthy friend.

But she herself was under no such restraint. "It isn't that," she said quickly. "It's the reformatory—I've worried myself sick over it."

West averted his gaze; he saw that it had come, and in a peculiarly aggravated form. He recognized at once how impossible it would be to talk the matter over, in a calm and rational way, under such conditions as these. This little girl had brooded over it till the incident had assumed grotesque and fantastic proportions in her mind. She was seeing visions, having nightmares. In a soothing, sympathetic voice, he began consoling her with the thought that a postponement for two brief years was really not so serious, and that—

"It isn't that!" she corrected him again, in the same voice. "That was pretty bad, but—what I have minded so much was M—— was the Post's desertion."

West's troubled eyes fell. But some hovering imp of darkness instantly popped it into his head to ask: "Have you seen Queed?"

"No," said Sharlee, colorlessly. "Not since—"

"You—didn't know, then, that he has left the Post?"

"Left the Post!" she echoed, with a face suddenly rigid. "No! Did he? Won't you tell me—?"

West looked unhappily at the floor. "Well—I'd much rather not go into this now. But the fact is that he left because ... well, we had a difference of opinion as to that reformatory article."

Sharlee turned hastily away, pretending to look for her fan. The sudden shutting of that tiny door had shot her through with unexpected pain. The last doubt fell now; all was plain. Mr. Queed had been discharged for writing an article which outraged his chief's sense of honor, that knightly young chief who still would not betray him by a word. The little door clicked; Sharlee turned the key upon it and threw away the key. And then she turned upon West a face so luminous with pure trust that it all but unsteadied him.

To do West justice, it was not until his words had started caroming down the eternal halls of time, that their possible implication dawned upon him. His vague idea had been merely to give a non-committal summary of the situation to ease the present moment; this to be followed, at a more suitable time, by the calm and rational explanation he had always intended. But the magical effect of his chance words, entirely unexpected by him, was quite too delightful to be wiped out. To erase that look from the tired little lady's face by labored exposition and tedious statistic would be the height of clumsy unkindness. She had been unhappy; he had made her happy; that was all that was vital just now. At a later time, when she had stopped brooding over the thing and could see and discuss it intelligently, he would take her quietly and straighten the whole matter out for her.

For this present, there was a look in her eyes which made a trip-hammer of his heart. Never had her face—less of the mere pretty young girl's than he had ever seen it, somewhat worn beneath its color, a little wistful under her smile—seemed to him so immeasurably sweet. In his blood Straus and the famous Verzenay plied their dizzying vocations. Suddenly he leaned forward, seeing nothing but two wonderful blue eyes, and his hand fell upon hers, with a grip which claimed her out of all the world.

"Sharlee" he said hoarsely. "Don't you know that—"

But he was, alas, summarily checked. At just that minute, outraged partners of Miss Weyland's espied and descended upon them with loud reproachful cries, and Charles Gardiner West's moment of superb impetuosity had flowered in nothing.

* * * * *

At a little earlier hour on the same evening, in a dining-room a mile away, eight men met "without political significance" to elect a new set of officers for the city. A bit of red-tape legislation permitted the people to ratify the choices at a "primary," to be held some months later; but the election came now. Unanimously, and with little or no discussion, the eight men elected one of their own number, Mr. Meachy T. Bangor by name, to the office of Mayor of the City.

One of them then referred humorously to Mr. Bangor as just the sort of progressive young reformer that suited him. Another suggested, more seriously, that they might have to allow for the genuine article some day. Plonny Neal, who sat at the head of the table, as being the wisest of them, said that the organization certainly must expect to knuckle to reform some day; perhaps in eight years, perhaps in twelve years, perhaps in sixteen.

"Got your young feller all picked out, Plonny?" queried the Mayor elect, Mr. Bangor, with a wink around the room.

Plonny denied that he had any candidate. Under pressure, however, he admitted having his eye on a certain youth, a "dark horse" who was little known at present, but who, in his humble judgment, was a coming man. Plonny said that this man was very young just now, but would be plenty old enough before they would have need of him.

Mr. Bangor once more winked at the six. "Why, Plonny, I thought you were rooting for Charles Gardenia West."

"Then there's two of ye," said Plonny, dryly, "he being the other one."

He removed his unlighted cigar, and spat loudly into a tall brass cuspidor, which he had taken the precaution to place for just such emergencies.

"Meachy," said Plonny, slowly, "I wouldn't give the job of dog-catcher to a man you couldn't trust to stand by his friends."



XXVIII

How Words can be like Blows, and Blue Eyes stab deep; how Queed sits by a Bedside and reviews his Life; and how a Thought leaps at him and will not down.

In the first crushing burst of revelation, Queed had had a wild impulse to wash his hands of everything, and fly. He would pack Surface off to a hospital; dispose of the house; escape back to Mrs. Paynter's; forget his terrible knowledge, and finally bury it with Surface. His reason fortified the impulse at every point. He owed less than nothing to his father; he had not the slightest responsibility either toward him or for him; to acknowledge the relation between them would do no conceivable good to anybody. He would go back to the Scriptorium, and all would be as it had been before.

But when the moment came either to go or to stay, another and deeper impulse rose against this one, and beat it down. Within him a voice whispered that though he might go back to the Scriptorium, he would never be as he had been before. Whether he acknowledged the relation or not, it was still there. And, in time, his reason brought forth material to fortify this impulse, too: it came out in brief, grim sentences which burned themselves into his mind. Surface was his father. To deny the primal blood-tie was not honorable. The sins of the fathers descended to the children. To suppress Truth was the crowning blasphemy.

Queed did not go. He stayed, resolved, after a violent struggle—it was all over in the first hour of his discovery—to bear his burden, shouldering everything that his sonship involved.

By day and by night the little house stood very quiet. Its secret remained inviolate; the young man was still Mr. Queed, the old one still Professor Nicolovius, who had suffered the last of his troublesome "strokes." Inside the darkened windows, life moved on silent heels. The doctor came, did nothing, and went. The nurse did nothing but stayed. Queed would have dismissed her at once, except that that would have been bad economy; he must keep his own more valuable time free for the earning of every possible penny. To run the house, he had, for the present, his four hundred and fifty dollars in bank, saved out of his salary. This, he figured, would last nine weeks. Possibly Surface would last longer than that: that remained to be seen.

Late on a March afternoon, Queed finished a review article—his second since he had left the newspaper, four days before—and took it himself to the post-office. He wanted to catch the night mail for the North; and besides his body, jaded by two days' confinement, cried aloud for a little exercise. His fervent desire was to rush out all the articles that were in him, and get money for them back with all possible speed. But he knew that the market for this work was limited. He must find other work immediately; he did not care greatly what kind it was, provided only that it was profitable. Thoughts of ways and means, mostly hard thoughts, occupied his mind all the way downtown. And always it grew plainer to him how much he was going to miss, now of all times, his eighteen hundred a year from the Post.

In the narrowest corridor of the post-office—like West in the Byrds' vestibule—he came suddenly face to face with Sharlee Weyland.

The meeting was unwelcome to them both, and both their faces showed it. Sharlee had told herself, a thousand times in a week, that she never wanted to see Mr. Queed again. Queed had known, without telling himself at all, that he did not want to see Miss Weyland, not, at least, till he had more time to think. But Queed's dread of seeing the girl had nothing to do with what was uppermost in her mind—the Post's treacherous editorial. Of course, West had long since made that right as he had promised, as he would have done with no promising. But—ought he to tell her now, or to wait?... And what would she say when she knew the whole shameful truth about him—knew that for nearly a year Surface Senior and Surface Junior, shifty father and hoodwinked son, had been living fatly on the salvage of her own plundered fortune?

She would have passed him with a bow, but Queed, more awkward than she, involuntarily halted. The dingy gas-light, which happened to be behind him, fell full upon her face, and he said at once:—

"How do you do?—not very well, I fear. You look quite used up—not well at all."

Pride raised a red flag in her cheek. She lifted a great muff to her lips, and gave a little laugh.

"Thank you. I am quite well."

Continuing to gaze at her, he went ahead with customary directness: "Then I am afraid you have been taking—the reformatory too hard."

"No, not the reformatory. It is something worse than that. I had a friend once," said Sharlee, muff to her lips, and her level eyes, upon him, "and he was not worthy."

To follow out that thought was impossible, but Queed felt very sorry for West when he saw how she said it.

"I'm sorry that you should have had this—to distress you. However—"

"Isn't it rather late to think of that now? As to saying it—I should have thought that you would tell me of your sorrow immediately—or not at all."

A long look passed between them. Down the corridor, on both sides of them, flowed a stream of people bent upon mails; but these two were alone in the world.

"Have you seen West?" asked Queed, in a voice unlike his own.

She made a little movement of irrepressible distaste.

"Yes.... But you must not think that he told me. He is too kind, too honorable to betray his friend."

He stared at her, reft of the power of speech.

From under the wide hat, the blue eyes seemed to leap out and stab him; they lingered, turning the knife, while their owner appeared to be waiting for him to speak; and then with a final twist, they were pulled away, and Queed found himself alone in the corridor.

He dropped his long envelope in the slot labeled North, and turned his footsteps toward Duke of Gloucester Street again.

Within him understanding had broken painfully into flame. Miss Weyland believed that he was the author of the unforgivable editorial—he, who had so gladly given, first the best abilities he had, and then his position itself, to the cause of Eva Bernheimer. West had seen her, and either through deliberate falseness or his characteristic fondness for shying off from disagreeable subjects—Queed felt pretty sure it was the latter—had failed to reveal the truth. West's motives did not matter in the least. The terrible situation in which he himself had been placed was all that mattered, and that he must straighten out at once. What dumbness had seized his tongue just now he could not imagine. But it was plain that, however much he would have preferred not to see the girl at all, this meeting had made another one immediately necessary: he must see her at once, to-night, and clear himself wholly of this cruel suspicion. And yet ... he could never clear himself of her having suspected him; he understood that, and it seemed to him a terrible thing. No matter how humble her contrition, how abject her apologies, nothing could ever get back of what was written, or change the fact that she had believed him capable of that.

The young man pursued his thoughts over three miles of city streets, and returned to the house of Surface.

The hour was 6.30. He took the nurse's seat by the bedside of his father and sent her away to her dinner.

There was a single gas-light in the sick-room, turned just high enough for the nurse to read her novels. The old man lay like a log, though breathing heavily; under the flickering light, his face looked ghastly. It had gone all to pieces; advanced old age had taken possession of it in a night. Moreover the truth about the auburn mustaches and goatee was coming out in snowy splotches; the fading dye showed a mottle of red and white not agreeable to the eye. Here was not merely senility, but ignoble and repulsive senility.

His father!... his father! O God! How much better to have sprung, as he once believed, from the honest loins of Tim Queed!

The young man averted his eyes from the detestable face of his father, and let his thoughts turn inward upon himself. For the first time in all his years, he found himself able to trace his own life back to its source, as other men do. A flying trip to New York, and two hours with Tim Queed, had answered all questions, cleared up all doubts. First of all, it had satisfied him that there was no stain upon his birth. Surface's second marriage had been clandestine, but it was genuine; in Newark the young man found the old clergyman who had officiated at the ceremony. His mother, it seemed, had been Miss Floretta May Earle, a "handsome young opery singer," of a group, so Tim said, to which the gentleman, his father, had been very fond of giving his "riskay little bacheldore parties."

Tim's story, in fact, was comprehensive at all points. He had been Mr. Surface's coachman and favorite servant in the heyday of the Southern apostate's metropolitan glories. About a year before the final catastrophe, Surface's affairs being then in a shaky condition, the servants had been dismissed, the handsome house sold, and the financier, in a desperate effort to save himself, had moved off somewhere to modest quarters in a side street. That was the last Tim heard of his old patron, till the papers printed the staggering news of his arrest. A few weeks later, Tim one day received a message bidding him come to see his former master in the Tombs.

The disgraced capitalist's trial was then in its early stages, but he entertained not the smallest hope of acquittal. Broken and embittered, he confided to his faithful servant that, soon after the break-up of his establishment, he had quietly married a wife; that some weeks earlier she had presented him with a son; and that she now lay at the point of death with but remote chances of recovery. To supply her with money was impossible, for his creditors, he said, had not only swooped down like buzzards upon the remnant of his fortune, but were now watching his every move under the suspicion that he had managed to keep something back. All his friends had deserted him as though he were a leper, for his had been the unpardonable sin of being found out. In all the world there was no equal of whom he was not too proud to ask a favor.

In short, he was about to depart for a long sojourn in prison, leaving behind a motherless, friendless, and penniless infant son. Would Tim take him and raise him as his own?

While Tim hesitated over this amazing request, Surface leaned forward and whispered a few words in his ear. He had contrived to secrete a little sum of money, a very small sum, but one which, well invested as it was, would provide just enough for the boy's keep. Tim was to receive twenty-five dollars monthly for his trouble and expense; Surface pledged his honor as a gentleman that he would find a way to smuggle this sum to him on the first of every month. Tim, being in straits at the time, accepted with alacrity. No, he could not say that Mr. Surface had exhibited any sorrow over the impending decease of his wife, or any affectionate interest in his son. In fact the ruined man seemed to regard the arrival of the little stranger—"the brat," as he called him—with peculiar exasperation. Tim gathered that he never expected or desired to see his son, whatever the future held, and that, having arranged for food and shelter, he meant to wash his hands of the whole transaction. The honest guardian's sole instructions were to keep mum as the grave; to provide the necessaries of life as long as the boy was dependent upon him; not to interfere with him in any way; but if he left, always to keep an eye on him, and stand ready to produce him on demand. To these things, and particularly to absolute secrecy, Tim was sworn by the most awful of oaths; and so he and his master parted. A week later a carriage was driven up to Tim's residence in the dead of the night, and a small bundle of caterwauling humankind was transferred from the one to the other. Such was the beginning of the life of young Queed. The woman, his mother, had died a day or two before, and where she had been buried Tim had no idea.

So the years passed, while the Queeds watched with amazement the subtly expanding verification of the adage that blood will tell. For Mr. Surface, said Tim, had been a great scholard, and used to sit up to all hours reading books that Thomason, the butler, couldn't make head nor tail of; and so with Surface's boy. He was the strange duckling among chickens who, with no guidance, straightway plumed himself for the seas of printed knowledge. Time rolled on. When Surface was released from prison, as the papers announced, there occurred not the smallest change in the status of affairs; except that the monthly remittances now bore the name of Nicolovius, and came from Chicago or some other city in the west. More years passed; and at last, one day, after a lapse of nearly a quarter of a century, the unexpected happened, as it really will sometimes. Tim got a letter in a handwriting he knew well, instructing him to call next day at such-and-such a time and place.

Tim was not disobedient to the summons. He called; and found, instead of the dashing young master he had once known, a soft and savage old man whom he at first utterly failed to recognize. Surface paced the floor and spoke his mind. It seemed that an irresistible impulse had led him back to his old home city; that he had settled and taken work there; and there meant to end his days. Under these circumstances, some deep-hidden instinct—a whim, the old man called it—had put it into his head to consider the claiming and final acknowledgment of his son. After all the Ishmaelitish years of bitterness and wandering, Surface's blood, it seemed, yearned for his blood. But under no circumstances, he told Tim, would he acknowledge his son before his death, since that would involve the surrender of his incognito; and not even then, so the old man swore, unless he happened to be pleased with the youth—the son of his body whom he had so utterly neglected through all these years. Therefore, his plan was to have the boy where they would meet as strangers; where he could have an opportunity to watch, weigh, and come to know him in the most casual way; and thereafter to act as he saw fit.

So there, in the shabby lodging-house, the little scheme was hatched out. Surface undertook by his own means to draw his son, as the magnet the particle of steel, to his city. Tim, to whom the matter was sure to be broached, was to encourage the young man to go. But more than this: it was to be Tim's diplomatic task to steer him to the house where Surface, as Nicolovius, resided. Surface himself had suggested the device by which this was to be done; merely that Tim, mentioning the difficulties of the boarding-house question in a strange city, was to recall that through the lucky chance of having a cousin in this particular city, he knew of just the place: a house where accommodations were of the best, particularly for those who liked quiet for studious work, and prices ridiculously low. The little stratagem worked admirably. The address which Tim gave young Surface was the address of Mrs. Paynter's, where Surface Senior had lived for nearly three years. And so the young man had gone to his father, straight as a homing pigeon.

How strange, how strange to look back on all this now!

Half reclining in the nurse's chair, unseeing eyes on the shaded and shuttered window, for the fiftieth time Queed let his mind go back over his days at Mrs. Paynter's, reading them all anew in the light of his staggering knowledge. With three communications of the most fragmentary sort, his father had had his full will of his son. With six typewritten lines, he had drawn the young man to his side at his own good pleasure. Boarding-house gossip made it known that the son was in peril of ejectment for non-payment of board, and a twenty-dollar bill had been promptly transmitted—at some risk of discovery—to ease his stringency. Last came the mysterious counsel to make friends and to like people, the particular friends and people intended being consolidated, he could understand now, in the person of old Nicolovius. And that message out of the unknown had had its effect: Queed could see that now, at any rate. His father clearly had been satisfied with the result; he appeared as his father no more. Thenceforward he stalked his prey as Nicolovius—with what consummate skill and success!

Oh, but did he not have a clever father, a stealthy, cunning, merciless father, soft-winged, foul-eyed, hungry-taloned, flitting noiselessly in circles, that grew ever and ever narrower, sure, and unfaltering to the final triumphant swoop! Or no—Rather a coiled and quiescent father, horrible-eyed, lying in slimy rings at the foot of the tree, basilisk gaze fixed upward, while the enthralled bird fluttered hopelessly down, twig by twig, ever nearer and nearer.

But no—his metaphors were very bad; he was sentimentalizing, rhetorizing, a thing that he particularly abhorred. Not in any sense was he the pitiful prey of his father, the hawk or the snake. Rather was he glad that, after long doubt and perplexity, at last he knew. For that was the passion of all his chaste life: to know the truth and to face it without fear.

Surface stirred slightly in his bed, and Queed, turning his eyes, let them rest briefly on that repulsive face. His father!... And he must wear that name and shoulder that infamy forevermore!

* * * * *

The nurse came back and relieved him of his vigil. He descended the stairs to his solitary dinner. And as he went, and while he lingered over food which he did not eat, his thoughts withdrew from his terrible inheritance to centre anew on the fact that, within an hour, he was to see Miss Weyland again.

The prospect drew him while it even more strongly repelled.

For a week he had hesitated, unable to convince himself that he was justified in telling Miss Weyland at once the whole truth about himself, his father, and her money. There was much on the side of delay. Surface might die at any moment, and this would relieve his son from the smallest reproach of betraying a confidence: the old man himself had said that everything was to be made known when he died. On the other hand Surface might get well, and if he did, he ought to be given a final chance to make the restitution himself. Besides this, there was the great uncertainty about the money. Queed had no idea how much it was, or where it was, or whether or not, upon Surface's death, he himself was to get it by bequest. But all through these doubts, passionately protesting against them, had run his own insistent feeling that it was not right to conceal the truth, even under such confused conditions—not, at least, from the one person who was so clearly entitled to know it. This feeling had reached a climax even before he met the girl this afternoon. Somehow that meeting had served to precipitate his decision. After all, Surface had had both his chance and his warning.

That his sonship would make him detestable in Miss Weyland's sight was highly probable, but he could not let the fear of that keep him silent. His determination to tell her the essential facts had come now, at last, as a kind of corollary to his instant necessity of straightening out the reformatory situation. This latter necessity had dominated his thought ever since the chance meeting in the post-office. And as his mind explored the subject, it ramified, and grew more complicated and oppressive with every step of the way.

It gradually became plain to him that, in clearing himself of responsibility for the Post's editorial, he would have to put West in a very unpleasant position. He would have to convict him, not only of having written the perfidious article, but of having left another man under the reproach of having written it. But no; it could not be said that he was putting West in this position. West had put himself there. It was he who had written the article, and it was he who had kept silent about it. Every man must accept the responsibility for his own acts, or the world would soon be at sixes and sevens. In telling Miss Weyland the truth about the matter, as far as that went, he would be putting himself in an unpleasant position. Nobody liked to see one man "telling on" another. He did not like it himself, as he remembered, for instance, in the case of young Brown in the Blames College hazing affair.

Queed sat alone in the candle-lit dining-room, thinking things out. A brilliant idea came to him. He would telephone to West, explain the situation to him, and ask him to set it right immediately. West, of course, would do so. At the worst, he had only temporized with the issue—perhaps had lost sight of it altogether—and he would be shocked to learn of the consequences of his procrastination. He himself could postpone his call on Miss Weyland till to-morrow, leaving West to go to-night. Of course, however, nothing his former chief could do now would change the fact that Miss Weyland herself had doubted him.

Undoubtedly, the interview would be a painful one for West. How serious an offense the girl considered the editorial had been plain in his own brief conversation with her. And West would have to acknowledge, further, that he had kept quiet about it for a week. Miss Weyland would forgive West, of course, but he could never be the same to her again. He would always have that spot. Queed himself felt that way about it. He had admired West more than any man he ever knew, more even than Colonel Cowles, but now he could never think very much of him again. He was quite sure that Miss Weyland was like that, too. Thus the matter began to grow very serious. For old Surface, who was always right about people, had said that West was the man that Miss Weyland meant to marry.

Very gradually, for the young man was still a slow analyst where people were concerned, an irresistible conclusion was forced upon him.

Miss Weyland would rather think that he had written the editorial than to know that West had written it.

The thought, when he finally reached it, leapt up at him, but he pushed it away. However, it returned. It became like one of those swinging logs which hunters hang in trees to catch bears: the harder he pushed it away, the harder it swung back at him.

He fully understood the persistence of this idea. It was the heart and soul of the whole question. He himself was simply Miss Weyland's friend, the least among many. If belief in his dishonesty had brought her pain—and he had her word for that—it was a hurt that would quickly pass. False friends are soon forgotten. But to West belonged the shining pedestal in the innermost temple of her heart. It would go hard with the little lady to find at the last moment this stain upon her lover's honor.

He had only to sit still and say nothing to make her happy. That was plain. So the whole issue was shifted. It was not, as it had first seemed, merely a matter between West and himself. The real issue was between Miss Weyland and himself—between her happiness and his ... no, not his happiness—his self-respect, his sense of justice, his honor, his chaste passion for Truth, his ... yes, his happiness.

Did he think most of Miss Weyland or of himself? That was what it all came down to. Here was the new demand that his acknowledgment of a personal life was making upon him, the supreme demand, it seemed, that any man's personal life could ever make upon him. For if, on the day when Nicolovius had suddenly revealed himself as Surface, he had been asked to give himself bodily, he was now asked to give himself spiritually—to give all that made him the man he was.

From the stark alternative, once raised, there was no escape. Queed closed with it, and together they went down into deep waters.



XXIX

In which Queed's Shoulders can bear One Man's Roguery and Another's Dishonor, and of what these Fardels cost him: how for the Second Time in his Life he stays out of Bed to think.

Sharlee, sitting upstairs, took the card from the tray and, seeing the name upon it, imperceptibly hesitated. But even while hesitating, she rose and turned to her dressing-table mirror.

"Very well. Say that I'll be down in a minute."

She felt nervous, she did not know why; chilled at her hands and cold within; she rubbed her cheeks vigorously with a handkerchief to restore to them some of the color which had fled. There was a slightly pinched look at the corners of her mouth, and she smiled at her reflection in the glass, somewhat artificially and elaborately, until she had chased it away. Undoubtedly she had been working too hard by day, and going too hard by night; she must let up, stop burning the candle at both ends. But she must see Mr. Queed, of course, to show him finally that no explanation could explain now. It came into her mind that this was but the third time he had ever been inside her house—the third, and it was the last.

He had been shown into the front parlor, the stiffer and less friendly of the two rooms, and its effect of formality matched well with the temper of their greeting. By the obvious stratagem of coming down with book in one hand and some pretense at fancy-work in the other, Sharlee avoided shaking hands with him. Having served their purpose, the small burdens were laid aside upon the table. He had been standing, awaiting her, in the shadows near the mantel; the chair that he chanced to drop into stood almost under one of the yellow lamps; and when she saw his face, she hardly repressed a start. For he seemed to have aged ten years since he last sat in her parlor, and if she had thought his face long ago as grave as a face could be, she now perceived her mistake.

The moment they were seated he began, in his usual voice, and with rather the air of having thought out in advance exactly what he was to say.

"I have come again, after all, to talk only of definite things. In fact, I have something of much importance to tell you. May I ask that you will consider it as confidential for the present?"

At the very beginning she was disquieted by the discovery that his gaze was steadier than her own. She was annoyingly conscious of looking away from him, as she said:—

"I think you have no right to ask that of me."

Surface's son smiled sadly. "It is not about—anything that you could possibly guess. I have made a discovery of—a business nature, which concerns you vitally."

"A discovery?"

"Yes. The circumstances are such that I do not feel that anybody should know of it just yet, but you. However—"

"I think you must leave me to decide, after hearing you—"

"I believe I will. I am not in the least afraid to do so. Miss Weyland, Henry G. Surface is alive."

Her face showed how completely taken back she was by the introduction of this topic, so utterly remote from the subject she had expected of him.

"Not only that," continued Queed, evenly—"he is within reach. Both he—and some property which he has—are within reach of the courts."

"Oh! How do you know?... Where is he?"

"For the present I am not free to answer those questions."

There was a brief silence. Sharlee looked at the fire, the stirrings of painful memories betrayed in her eyes.

"We knew, of course, that he might be still alive," she said slowly. "I—hope he is well and happy. But—we have no interest in him now. That is all closed and done with. As for the courts—I am sure that he has been punished already more than enough."

"It is not a question of punishing him any more. You fail to catch my meaning, it seems. It has come to my knowledge that he has some money, a good deal of it—"

"But you cannot have imagined that I would want his money?"

"His money? He has none. It is all yours. That is why I am telling you about it."

"Oh, but that can't be possible. I don't understand."

Sitting upright in his chair, as businesslike as an attorney, Queed explained how Surface had managed to secrete part of the embezzled trustee funds, and had been snugly living on it ever since his release from prison.

"The exact amount is, at present, mere guesswork. But I think it will hardly fall below fifty thousand dollars, and it may run as high as a hundred thousand. I learn that Mr. Surface thinks, or pretends to think, that this money belongs to him. He is, needless to say, wholly mistaken. I have taken the liberty of consulting a lawyer about it, of course laying it before him as a hypothetical case. I am advised that when Mr. Surface was put through bankruptcy, he must have made a false statement in order to withhold this money. Therefore, that settlement counts for nothing, except to make him punishable for perjury now. The money is yours whenever you apply for it. That—"

"Oh—but I shall not apply for it. I don't want it, you see."

"It is not a question of whether you want it or not. It is yours—in just the way that the furniture in this room is yours. You simply have no right to evade it."

Through all the agitation she felt in the sudden dragging out of this long-buried subject, his air of dictatorial authority brought the blood to her cheek.

"I have a right to evade it, in the first place, and in the second, I am not evading it at all. He took it; I let him keep it. That is the whole situation. I don't want it—I couldn't touch it—"

"Well, don't decide that now. There would be no harm, I suppose, in your talking with your mother about it—even with some man in whose judgment you have confidence. You will feel differently when you have had time to think it over. Probably it—"

"Thinking it over will make not the slightest difference in the way I feel—"

"Perhaps it would if you stopped thinking about it from a purely selfish point of view. Other—"

"What?"

"I say," he repeated dryly, "that you should stop thinking of the matter from a purely selfish point of view. Don't you know that that is what you are doing? You are thinking only whether or not you, personally, desire this money. Well, other people have an interest in the question besides you. There is your mother, for example. Why not consider it from her standpoint? Why not consider it from—well, from the standpoint of Mr. Surface?"

"Of Mr. Surface?"

"Certainly. Suppose that in his old age he has become penitent, and wants to do what he can to right the old wrong. Would you refuse him absolution by declining to accept your own money?"

"I think it will be time enough to decide that when Mr. Surface asks me for absolution."

"Undoubtedly. I have particularly asked, you remember, that you do not make up your mind to anything now."

"But you," said she, looking at him steadily enough now—"I don't understand how you happen to be here apparently both as my counselor and Mr. Surface's agent."

"I have a right to both capacities, I assure you."

"Or—have you a habit of being—?"

She left her sentence unended, and he finished it for her in a colorless voice.

"Of being on two sides of a fence, perhaps you were about to say?"

She made no reply.

"That is what you were going to say, isn't it?"

"Yes, I started to say that," she answered, "and then I thought better of it."

She spoke calmly; but she was oddly disquieted by his fixed gaze, and angry with herself for feeling it.

"I will tell you," said he, "how I happen to be acting in both capacities."

The marks of his internal struggle broke through upon his face. For the first time, it occurred to Sharlee, as she looked at the new markings about his straight-cut mouth, that this old young man whom she had commonly seen so matter-of-fact and self-contained, might be a person of stronger emotions than her own. After all, what did she really know about him?

As if to answer her, his controlled voice spoke.

"Mr. Surface is my father. I am his son."

She smothered a little cry. "Your father!"

"My name," he said, with a face of stone, "is Henry G. Surface, Jr."

"Your father!" she echoed lifelessly.

Shocked and stunned, she turned her head hurriedly away; her elbow rested on the broad chair-arm, and her chin sank into her hand. Surface's son looked at her. It was many months since he had learned to look at her as at a woman, and that is knowledge that is not unlearned. His eyes rested upon her piled-up mass of crinkly brown hair; upon the dark curtain of lashes lying on her cheek; upon the firm line of the cheek, which swept so smoothly into the white neck; upon the rounded bosom, now rising and falling so fast; upon the whole pretty little person which could so stir him now to undreamed depths of his being.... No altruism here, Fifi; no self-denial to want to make her happy.

He began speaking quietly.

"I can't tell you now how I found out all this. It is a long story; you will hear it all some day. But the facts are all clear. I have been to New York and seen Tim Queed. It is—strange, is it not? Do you remember that afternoon in my office, when I showed you the letters from him? We little thought—"

"Oh me!" said Sharlee. "Oh me!"

She rose hastily and walked away from him, unable to bear the look on his face. For a pretense of doing something, she went to the fire and poked aimlessly at the glowing coals.

As on the afternoon of which he spoke, waves of pity for the little Doctor's worse than fatherlessness swept through her; only these waves were a thousand times bigger and stormier than those. How hardly he himself had taken his sonship she read in the strange sadness of his face. She dared not let him see how desperately sorry for him she felt; the most perfunctory phrase might betray her. Her knowledge of his falseness stood between them like a wall; blindly she struggled to keep it staunch, not letting her rushing pity undermine and crumble it. He had been false to her, like his father. Father and son, they had deceived and betrayed her; honor and truth were not in them.

"So you see," the son was saying, "I have a close personal interest in this question of the money. Naturally it—means a good deal to me to—have as much of it as possible restored. Of course there is a great deal which—he took, and which—we are not in position to restore at present. I will explain later what is to be done about that—"

"Oh, don't!" she begged. "I never want to see or hear of it again."

Suddenly she turned upon him, aware that her self-control was going, but unable for her life to repress the sympathy for him which welled up overwhelmingly from her heart.

"Won't you tell me something more about it? Please do! Where is he? Have you seen him—?"

"I cannot tell you—"

"Oh, I will keep your confidence. You asked me if I would. I will—won't you tell me? Is he here—in the city—?"

"You must not ask me these questions," he said with some evidence of agitation.

But even as he spoke, he saw knowledge dawn painfully on her face. His shelter, after all, was too small; once her glance turned that way, once her mind started upon conjectures, discovery had been inevitable.

"Oh!" she cried, in a choked voice.... "It is Professor Nicolovius!"

He looked at her steadily; no change passed over his face. When all was said, he was glad to have the whole truth out; and he knew the secret to be as safe with her as with himself.

"No one must know," he said sadly, "until his death. That is not far away, I think."

She dropped into a chair, and suddenly buried her face in her hands.

Surface's son had risen with her, but he did not resume his seat. He stood looking down at her bowed head, and the expression in his eyes, if she had looked up and captured it, might have taken her completely by surprise.

His chance, indeed, had summoned him, though not for the perfect sacrifice. Circumstance had crushed out most of the joy of giving. For, first, she had suspected him, which nothing could ever blot out; and now, when she knew the truth about him, there could hardly be much left for him to give. It needed no treacherous editorial to make her hate the son of his father; their friendship was over in any case.

Still, it was his opportunity to do for her something genuine and large; to pay in part the debt he owed her—the personal and living debt, which was so much greater than the dead thing of principal and interest.

No, no. It was not endurable that this proud little lady, who kept her head so high, should find at the last moment, this stain upon her lover's honor.

She dropped her hands and lifted a white face.

"And you—" she began unsteadily, but checked herself and went on in a calmer voice. "And you—after what he has done to you, too—you are going to stand by him—take his name—accept that inheritance—be his son?"

"What else is there for me to do?"

Their eyes met, and hers were hurriedly averted.

"Don't you think," he said, "that that is the only thing to do?"

Again she found it impossible to endure the knowledge of his fixed gaze. She rose once more and stood at the mantel, her forehead leaned against her hand upon it, staring unseeingly down into the fire.

"How can I tell you how fine a thing you are doing—how big—and splendid—when—"

A dark red color flooded his face from neck to forehead; it receded almost violently leaving him whiter than before.

"Not at all! Not in the least!" he said, with all his old impatience. "I could not escape if I would."

She seemed not to hear him. "How can I tell you that—and about how sorry I am—when all the time it seems that I can think only of—something else!"

"You are speaking of the reformatory," he said, with bracing directness.

There followed a strained silence.

"Oh," broke from her—"how could you bear to do it?"

"Don't you see that we cannot possibly discuss it? It is a question of one's honor—isn't it? It is impossible that such a thing could be argued about."

"But—surely you have something to say—some explanation to make! Tell me. You will not find me—a hard judge."

"I'm sorry," he said brusquely, "but I can make no explanation."

She was conscious that he stood beside her on the hearth-rug. Though her face was lowered and turned from him, the eye of her mind held perfectly the presentment of his face, and she knew that more than age had gone over it since she had seen it last. Had any other man in the world but West been in the balance, she felt that, despite his own words, she could no longer believe him guilty. And even as it was—how could that conceivably be the face of a man who—

"Won't you shake hands?"

Turning, she gave him briefly the tips of fingers cold as ice. As their hands touched, a sudden tragic sense overwhelmed him that here was a farewell indeed. The light contact set him shaking; and for a moment his iron self-control, which covered torments she never guessed at, almost forsook him.

"Good-by. And may that God of yours who loves all that is beautiful and sweet be good to you—now and always."

She made no reply; he wheeled, abruptly, and left her. But on the threshold he was checked by the sound of her voice.

The interview, from the beginning, had profoundly affected her; these last words, so utterly unlike his usual manner of speech, had shaken her through and through. For some moments she had been miserably aware that, if he would but tell her everything and throw himself on her mercy, she would instantly forgive him. And now, when she saw that she could not make him do that, she felt that tiny door, which she had thought double-locked forever, creaking open, and heard herself saying in a small, desperate voice:—

"You did write it, didn't you?"

But he paused only long enough to look at her and say, quite convincingly:—

"You need hardly ask that—now—need you?"

* * * * *

He went home, to his own bedroom, lit his small student-lamp, and sat down at his table to begin a new article. The debt of money which was his patrimony required of him that he should make every minute tell now.

In old newspaper files at the State Library, he had found the facts of his father's defalcations. The total embezzlement from the Weyland estate, allowing for $14,000 recovered in the enforced settlement of Surface's affairs, stood at $203,000. But that was twenty-seven years ago, and in all this time interest had been doubling and redoubling: simple interest, at 4%, brought it to $420,000; compound interest to something like $500,000, due at the present moment. Against this could be credited only his father's "nest-egg"—provided always that he could find it—estimated at not less than $50,000. That left his father's son staring at a debt of $450,000, due and payable now. It was of course, utterly hopeless. The interest on that sum alone was $18,000 a year, and he could not earn $5000 a year to save his immortal soul.

So the son knew that, however desperately he might strive, he would go to his grave more deeply in debt to Sharlee Weyland than he stood at this moment. But of course it was the trying that chiefly counted. The fifty thousand dollars, which he would turn over to her as soon as he got it—how he was counting on a sum as big as that!—would be a help; so would the three or four thousand a year which he counted on paying toward keeping down the interest. This money in itself would be a good. But much better than that, it would stand as a gage that the son acknowledged and desired to atone for his father's dishonor.

His book must stand aside now—it might be forever. Henceforward he must count his success upon a cash-register. But to-night his pencil labored and dragged. What he wrote he saw was not good. He could do harder things than force himself to sit at a table and put writing upon paper; but over the subtler processes of his mind, which alone yields the rich fruit, no man is master. In an hour he put out his lamp, undressed in the dark, and went to bed.

He lay on his back in the blackness, and in all the world he could find nothing to think about but Sharlee Weyland.

Of all that she had done for him, in a personal way, he had at least tried to give her some idea; he was glad to remember that now. And now at the last, when he was nearer worthy than ever before, she had turned him out because she believed that he had stooped to dishonor. She would have forgiven his sonship; he had been mistaken about that. She had felt sympathy and sorrow for Henry Surface's son, and not repulsion, for he had read it in her face. But she could not forgive him a personal dishonor. And he was glad that, so believing, she would do as she had done; it was the perfect thing to do; to demand honor without a blemish, or to cancel all. Never had she stood so high in his fancy as now when she had ordered him out of her life. His heart leapt with the knowledge that, though she would never know it, he was her true mate there, in their pure passion for Truth.

Whatever else might or might not have been, the knowledge remained with him that she herself had suspected and convicted him. In all that mattered their friendship had ended there. Distrust was unbearable between friends. It was a flaw in his little lady that she could believe him capable of baseness.... But not an unforgivable flaw, it would seem, since every hour that he had spent in her presence had become roses and music in his memory, and the thought that he would see her no more stabbed ceaselessly at his heart.

Yes, Surface's son knew very well what was the matter with him now. The knowledge pulled him from his bed to a seat by the open window; dragged him from his chair to send him pacing on bare feet up and down his little bedroom, up and down, up and down; threw him later, much later, into his chair again, to gaze out, quiet and exhausted, over the sleeping city.

He had written something of love in his time. In his perfect scheme of human society, he had diagnosed with scientific precision the instinct of sex attraction implanted in man's being for the most obvious and grossly practical of reasons: an illusive candle-glow easily lit, quickly extinguished when its uses were fulfilled. And lo, here was love tearing him by the throat till he choked; an exquisite torture, a rampant passion, a devastating flame, that most glorified when it burned most deeply, aroar and ablaze forevermore.

He sat by the window and looked out over the sleeping city.

By slow degrees, he had allowed himself to be drawn from his academic hermitry into contact with the visible life around him. And everywhere that he had touched life, it had turned about and smitten him. He had meant to be a great editor of the Post some day, and the Post had turned him out with a brand of dishonor upon his forehead. He had tried to befriend a friendless old man, and he had acquired a father whose bequest was a rogue's debt, and his name a byword and a hissing. He had let himself be befriended by a slim little girl with a passion for Truth and enough blue eyes for two, and the price of that contact was this pain in his heart which would not be still ... which would not be still.

Yet he would not have had anything different, would not have changed anything if he could. He was no longer the pure scientist in the observatory, but a bigger and better thing, a man ... A man down in the thick of the hurly-burly which we call This Life, and which, when all is said, is all that we certainly know. Not by pen alone, but also by body and mind and heart and spirit, he had taken his man's place in Society. And as for this unimagined pain that strung his whole being upon the thumb-screw, it was nothing but the measure of the life he had now, and had it more abundantly. Oh, all was for the best, all as it should be. He knew the truth about living at last, and it is the truth that makes men free.



XXX

Death of the Old Professor, and how Queed finds that his List of Friends has grown; a Last Will and Testament; Exchange of Letters among Prominent Attorneys, which unhappily proves futile.

On the merriest, maddest day in March, Henry G. Surface, who had bitterly complained of earthly justice, slipped away to join the invisible procession which somewhere winds into the presence of the Incorruptible Judge. He went with his lips locked. At the last moment there had been faint signs of recurring consciousness; the doctor had said that there was one chance in a hundred that the dying man might have a normal moment at the end. On this chance his son had said to the nurse, alone with him in the room:—

"Will you kindly leave me with him a moment? If he should be conscious there is a private question of importance that I must ask him."

She left him. The young man knelt down by the bedside, and put his lips close to the old man's ear. Vainly he tried to drive his voice into that stilled consciousness, and drag from his father the secret of the hiding-place of his loot.

"Father!" he said, over and over. "Father! Where is the money?"

There was no doubt that the old man stirred a little. In the dim light of the room it seemed to his son that his right eye half opened, leaving the other closed in a ghastly parody of a wink, while the upper lip drew away from the strong teeth like an evil imitation of the old bland sneer. But that was all.

So Surface died, and was gathered to his fathers. The embargo of secrecy was lifted; and the very first step toward righting the ancient wrong was to let the full facts be known. Henry G. Surface, Jr., took this step, in person, by at once telephoning all that was salient to the Post. Brower Williams, the Post's city editor, at the other end of the wire, called the name of his God in holy awe at the dimensions of the scoop thus dropped down upon him as from heaven; and implored the Doc, for old time's sake, by all that he held most sacred and most dear, to say not a word till the evening papers were out, thus insuring the sensation for the Post.

Mr. Williams's professional appraisement of the scoop proved not extravagant. The Post's five columns next morning threw the city into something like an uproar. It is doubtful if you would not have to go back to the '60's to find a newspaper story which eclipsed this one in effect. For a generation, the biography of Henry G. Surface had had, in that city and State, a quality of undying interest, and the sudden denouement, more thrilling than any fiction, captured the imagination of the dullest. Nothing else was mentioned at any breakfast-table where a morning paper was taken that day; hardly anything for many breakfasts to follow. In homes containing boys who had actually studied Greek under the mysterious Professor Nicolovius at Mimer's School, discussion grew almost hectic; while at Mrs. Paynter's, where everybody was virtually a leading actor in the moving drama, the excitement closely approached delirium.

Henry G. Surface, Jr., was up betimes on the morning after his father's death—in fact, as will appear, he had not found time to go to bed at all—and the sensational effects of the Post's story were not lost upon him. As early as seven o'clock, a knot of people had gathered in front of the little house on Duke of Gloucester Street, staring curiously at the shut blinds, and telling each other, doubtless, how well they had known the dead man. When young Surface came out of the front door, an awed hush fell upon them; he was aware of their nudges, and their curious but oddly respectful stare. And this, at the very beginning, was typical of the whole day; wherever he went, he found himself an object of the frankest public curiosity. But all of this interest, he early discovered, was neither cool nor impersonal.

To begin with, there was the Post's story itself. As he hurried through it very early in the morning, the young man was struck again and again with the delicacy of the phrasing. And gradually it came to him that the young men of the Post had made very special efforts to avoid hurting the feelings of their old associate and friend the Doc. This little discovery had touched him unbelievably. And it was only part with other kindness that came to him to soften that first long day of his acknowledged sonship. Probably the sympathy extended to him from various sources was not really so abundant, but to him, having looked for nothing, it was simply overwhelming. All day, it seemed to him, his door-bell and telephone rang, all day unexpected people of all sorts and conditions stopped him on the street—only to tell him, in many ways and sometimes without saying a word about it, that they were sorry.

The very first of them to come was Charles Gardiner West, stopping on his way to the office, troubled, concerned, truly sympathetic, to express, in a beautiful and perfect way, his lasting interest in his one-time assistant. Not far behind him had come Mr. Hickok, the director who looked like James E. Winter, who had often chatted with the assistant editor in times gone by, and who spoke confidently of the day when he would come back to the Post. Beverley Byrd had come, too, manly and friendly; Plonny Neal, ill at ease for once in his life; Evan Montague, of the Post, had asked to be allowed to make the arrangements for the funeral; Buck Klinker had actually made those arrangements. Better than most of these, perhaps, were the young men of the Mercury, raw, embarrassed, genuine young men, who, stopping him on the street, did not seem to know why they stopped him, who, lacking West's verbal felicity, could do nothing but take his hand, hot with the fear that they might be betrayed into expressing any feeling, and stammer out: "Doc, if you want anything—why dammit, Doc—you call on me, hear?"

Best of all had been Buck Klinker—Buck, who had made him physically, who had dragged him into contact with life over his own protests, who had given him the first editorial he ever wrote that was worth reading—Buck, the first real friend he had ever had. It was to Buck that he had telephoned an hour after his father's death, for he needed help of a practical sort at once, and his one-time trainer was the man of all men to give it to him. Buck had come, constrained and silent; he was obviously awed by the Doc's sudden emergence into stunning notoriety. To be Surface's son was, to him, like being the son of Iscariot and Lucrezia Borgia. On the other hand, he was aware that, of Klinkers and Queeds, a Surface might proudly say: "There are no such people." So he had greeted his friend stiffly as Mr. Surface, and was amazed at the agitation with which that usually impassive young man had put a hand upon his shoulder and said: "I'm the same Doc always to you, Buck, only now I'm Doc Surface instead of Doc Queed." After that everything had been all right. Buck had answered very much after the fashion of the young men of the Mercury, and then rushed off to arrange for the interment, and also to find for Doc Surface lodgings somewhere which heavily undercut Mrs. Paynter's modest prices.

The sudden discovery that he was not alone in the world, that he had friends in it, real friends who believed in him and whom nothing could ever take away, shook the young man to the depths of his being. Was not this compensation for everything? Never had he imagined that people could be so kind; never had he dreamed that people's kindness could mean so much to him. In the light of this new knowledge, it seemed to him that the last scales fell from his eyes ... Were not these friendships, after all, the best work of a man's life? Did he place a higher value even on his book itself, which, it seemed, he might never finish now?

And now there returned to him something that the dead old Colonel had told him long ago, and to-day he saw it for truth. However his father had wronged him, he would always have this, at least, to bless his memory for. For it was his father who had called him to live in this city where dwelt, as the strong voice that was now still had said, the kindest and sweetest people in the world.

* * * * *

Henry G. Surface died at half-past two o'clock on the afternoon of March 24. At one o'clock that night, while the Post's startling story was yet in process of the making, his son stood at the mantel in Surface's sitting-room, and looked over the wreck that his hands had made. That his father's treasures were hidden somewhere here he had hardly entertained a doubt. Yet he had pulled the place all to pieces without finding a trace of them.

The once pretty sitting-room looked, indeed, as if a tornado had struck it. The fireplace was a litter of broken brick and mortar; half the floor was ripped up and the boards flung back anyhow; table drawers and bookcases had been ransacked, and looked it; books rifled in vain were heaped in disorderly hummocks wherever there was room for them; everywhere a vandal hand had been, leaving behind a train of devastation and ruin.

And it had all been fruitless. He had been working without pause since half-past six o'clock, and not the smallest clue had rewarded him.

It was one of those interludes when early spring demonstrates that she could play August convincingly had she a mind to. The night was stifling. That the windows had to be shut tight, to deaden the noise of loosening brick and ripping board, made matters so much the worse. Surface was stripped to the waist, and it needed no second glance at him, as he stood now, to see that he was physically competent. There was no one-sided over-development here; Klinker's exercises, it will be remembered, were for all parts of the body. Shoulders stalwart, but not too broad, rounded beautifully into the upper arm; the chest swelled like a full sail; many a woman in that town had a larger waist. Never he moved but muscle flowed and rippled under the shining skin; he raised his right hand to scratch his left ear, and the hard blue biceps leaped out like a live thing. In fact, it had been some months since the young man had first entertained the suspicion that he could administer that thrashing to Mr. Pat whenever he felt inclined. Only it happened that he and Mr. Pat had become pretty good friends now, and it was the proof-reader's boast that he had never once made a bull in "Mr. Queed's copy" since the day of the famous fleas.

In the quiet night the young man stood resting from his labors, and taking depressed thought. He was covered with grime and streaked with sweat; a ragged red stripe on his cheek, where a board had bounced up and struck him, detracted nothing from the sombreness of his appearance. Somewhere, valuable papers waited to be found; bank-books, certainly; very likely stock or bonds or certificates of deposit; please God, a will. Somewhere—but where? From his father's significant remark during their last conversation, he would have staked his life that all these things were here, in easy reach. And yet—

Standing precariously on the loose-piled bricks of the fireplace, he looked over the ravaged room. He felt profoundly discouraged. Success in this search meant more to him than he liked to think about, and now his chance of success had shrunk to the vanishing point. The bowels of the room lay open before his eye, and there was no hiding-place in them. He knew of nowhere else to look. The cold fear seized him that the money and the papers were hidden beyond his finding—that they lay tucked away in some safety-deposit vault in New York, where his eye would never hunt them out.

Surface's son leaned against the elaborate mantel, illimitably weary. He shifted his position ever so little; and thereupon luck did for him what reason would never have done. The brick on which his right foot rested turned under his weight and he lost his foothold. To save himself, he caught the mantel-top with both hands, and the next moment pitched heavily backward to the floor.

The mantel, in fact, had come off in his hands. It pitched to the floor with him, speeding his fall, thumping upon his chest like a vigorous adversary. But the violence of his descent only made him the more sharply aware that this strange mantel had left its moorings as though on greased rollers.

His heart playing a sudden drum-beat, he threw the carven timber from him and bounded to his feet. The first flying glance showed him the strange truth: his blundering feet had marvelously stumbled into his father's arcana. For he looked, not at an unsightly mass of splintered laths and torn wall-paper and shattered plaster, but into as neat a little cupboard as a man could wish.

The cupboard was as wide as the mantel itself; lined and ceiled with a dark red wood which beautifully threw back the glare of the dancing gas-jet. It was half-full of things, old books, letters, bundles of papers held together with rubber bands, canvas bags—all grouped and piled in the most orderly way about a large tin dispatch-box. This box drew the young man's gaze like a sudden shout; he was hardly on his feet before he had sprung forward and jerked it out. Instantly the treacherous bricks threw him again; sprawled on the floor he seized one of them and smashed through the hasp at a blow.

Bit by bit the illuminating truth came out. In all his own calculations, close and exact as he had thought them, he had lost sight of one simple but vital fact. In the years that he had been in prison, his father had spent no money beyond the twenty-five dollars a month to Tim Queed; and comparatively little in the years of his wanderings. In all this time the interest upon his "nest-egg" had been steadily accumulating. Five per cent railroad bonds, and certificates of deposit in four different banks, were the forms in which the money had been tucked away, by what devilish cleverness could only be imagined. But the simple fact was that his father had died worth not less than two hundred thousand dollars and probably more. And this did not include the house, which, it appeared, his father had bought, and not leased as he said; nor did it include four thousand four hundred dollars in gold and banknotes which he found in the canvas sacks after his first flying calculation was made.

Early in the morning, when the newsboys were already crying the Post upon the streets, young Henry Surface came at last upon the will. It was very brief, but entirely clear and to the point. His father had left to him without conditions, everything of which he died possessed. The will was dated in June of the previous summer—he recalled a two days' absence of his father's at that time—and was witnessed, in a villainous hand, by Timothy Queed.

* * * * *

There were many formalities to be complied with, and some of them would take time. But within a week matters were on a solid enough footing to warrant a first step; and about this time Sharlee Weyland read, at her breakfast-table one morning, a long letter which surprised and disturbed her very much.

The letter came from a well-known firm of attorneys. At great length it rehearsed the misfortunes that had befallen the Weyland estate, through the misappropriations of the late Henry G. Surface. But the gist of this letter, briefly put, was that the late Henry G. Surface had died possessed of a property estimated to be worth two hundred thousand dollars, either more or less; that this property was believed to be merely the late trustee's appropriations from the Weyland estate, with accrued interest; that "our client Mr. Henry G. Surface, Jr., heir by will to his father's ostensible property," therefore purposed to pay over this sum to the Weyland estate, as soon as necessary formalities could be complied with; and that, further, our client, Mr. Henry G. Surface, Jr., assumed personal responsibility "for the residue due to your late father's estate, amounting to one hundred and seventeen thousand dollars, either more or less, with interest since 1881; and this debt, he instructs us to say, he will discharge from time to time, as his own resources will permit."