Mr. Dayne received assurance that Mr. Queed would do all that he could for him.  He left the telephone rather wishing that the assistant editor could sometimes be inspired into verbal enthusiasm.  But of his abilities the Secretary did not entertain the smallest doubt, and he felt that day that his long fight for the reformatory was as good as won.

Hanging up the receiver, Queed leaned back in his swivel chair and thoughtfully filled a pipe, which he smoked nowadays with an experienced and ripened pleasure.  At once he relapsed into absorbed thought.  Though he answered Mr. Dayne calmly and briefly according to his wont, the young man’s heart was beating faster with the knowledge that he stood at the crisis of his longest and dearest editorial fight.  He expected to win it.  The whole subject, from every conceivable point of view, was at his fingers’ ends.  He knew exactly what to say; his one problem was how to say it in the most irresistible way possible.

Yet Queed, tilted back in his chair, and staring out over the wet roofs, was not thinking of the reformatory.  He was thinking, not of public matters at all, but of the circumstances of his curious life with Henry G. Surface; and his thoughts were not agreeable in the least.

Not that he and the “old professor” did not get along well together.  It was really surprising how well they did get along.  Their dynamic interview of last June had at once been buried out of sight, and since then their days had flowed along with unbroken smoothness.  If there had been times when the young man’s thought recoiled from the compact and the intimacy, his manner never betrayed any sign of it.  On the contrary, he found himself mysteriously answering the growing dependence of the old man with a growing sense of responsibility toward him, and discovering in the process a curious and subtle kind of compensation.

What troubled Queed about Nicolovius—­as the world called him—­was his money.  He, Queed, was in part living on this money, eating it, drinking it, sleeping on it.  Of late the old man had been spending it with increasing freedom, constantly enlarging the comforts of the joint menage.  He had reached, in fact, a scale of living which constantly thrust itself on Queed’s consciousness as quite beyond the savings of a poor old school teacher.  And if this appearance were true, where did the surplus come from?

The question had knocked unpleasantly at the young man’s mind before now.  This morning he faced it, and pondered deeply.  A way occurred to him by which, possibly, he might turn a little light upon this problem.  He did not care to take it; he shrank from doing anything that might seem like spying upon the man whose bread he broke thrice daily.  Yet it seemed to him that a point had now been reached where he owed his first duty to himself.

“Come in,” he said, looking around in response to a brisk knock upon his shut door; and there entered Plonny Neal, whom Queed, through the Mercury, knew very well now.