“Of course,” said Nicolovius.  “It is as well known as Iscariot’s.  By God, how they’ve hounded me!”

Evidently he was recovering fast.  There was bitterness, rather than shame, in his voice.  He took his hands from his eyes, adjusted his cap, stiffened up in his chair.  The sallow tints were coming back into his face; his lips took on color; his eye and hand were steady.  Not every man could have passed through such a cataclysm and emerged so little marked.  He picked up his cigarette from the table; it was still going.  This fact was symbolic:  the great shock had come and passed within the smoking of an inch of cigarette.  The pretty room was as it was before.  Pale sunshine still flickered on the swelling curtain.  The leather desk-clock gayly ticked the passing seconds.  The young man’s clean-cut face looked as quiet as ever.

Upon Queed the old man fastened his fearless black eyes.

“I meant to tell you all this some day,” he said, in quite a natural voice.  “Now the day has come a little sooner than I had meant—­that is all.  I know that my confidence is safe with you—­till I die.”

“I think you have nothing to fear by trusting me,” said Queed, and added at once:  “But you need tell me nothing unless you prefer.”

A kind of softness shone for a moment in Surface’s eyes.  “Nobody could look at your face,” he said gently, “and ever be afraid to trust you.”

The telephone rang, and Queed could answer it by merely putting out his hand.  It was West, from the office, asking that he report for work that night, as he himself was compelled to be away.

Presently Surface began talking; talking in snatches, more to himself than to his young friend, rambling backward over his broken life in passionate reminiscence.  He talked a long time thus, while the daylight faded and dusk crept into the room, and then night; and Queed listened, giving him all the rein he wanted and saying never a word himself.

“...  Pray your gods,” said Surface, “that you never have such reason to hate your fellow-men as I have had, my boy.  For that has been the keynote of my unhappy life.  God, how I hated them all, and how I do yet!...  Not least Weyland, with his ostentatious virtue, his holier-than-thou kindness, his self-righteous magnanimity tossed even to me ... the broken-kneed idol whom others passed with averted face, and there was none so poor to do me reverence....”

So this, mused Queed, was the meaning of the old professor’s invincible dislike for Miss Weyland, which he had made so obvious in the boarding-house that even Mr. Bylash commented on it.  He had never been able to forgive her father’s generosity, which he had so terribly betrayed; her name and her blood rankled and festered eternally in the heart of the faithless friend and the striped trustee.

Henderson, the ancient African who attended the two men, knocked upon the shut door with the deprecatory announcement that he had twice rung the supper-bell.