Queed walked with his head lowered, bent less against the rain than his own stinging thoughts.  At the corner of Seventh Street a knot of young men, waiting under a dripping awning for a car that would not come, cried out gayly to the Doc; they were Mercuries; but the Doc failed to respond to their greetings, or even to hear them.  He crossed the humming street, northerly, with an experienced sureness acquired since his exploit with the dog Behemoth; and so came into his own section of the town.

He was an apostle of law who of all things loved harmony.  Already his mind was busily at work seeking to restore order out of the ruins of his house.  Obviously the first thing to do, the one thing that could not wait an hour, was to get his sense of honesty somehow back again.  He must compel Surface to hand over to Miss Weyland immediately every cent of money that he had.  The delivery could be arranged easily enough, without any sensational revelations.  The letter to Miss Weyland could come from a lawyer in the West; in Australia, if the old man liked; that didn’t matter.  The one thing that did matter was that he should immediately make restitution as fully as lay within the power of them both.

Surface, of course, would desperately resist such a suggestion.  Queed knew of but one club which could drive him to agree to it, one goad which could rowel him to the height.  This was his own continued companionship.  He could compel Surface to disgorgement only at the price of a new offering of himself to the odious old man who had played false with him as with everybody else.  Queed did not hesitate.  At the moment every cost seemed small to clear his dearest belonging, which was his personal honesty, of this stain.  As for Surface, nothing could make him more detestable in a moral sense than he had been all along.  He had been a thief and a liar from the beginning.  Once the cleansing storm was over, their unhappy domestic union could go on much as it had done before.

For his part, he must at once set about restoring his half of the joint living expenses consumed during the past nine months.  This money could be passed in through the lawyer with the rest, so that she would never know.  Obviously, he would have to make more money than he was making now, which meant that he would have to take still more time from his book.  There were his original tax articles in the Post, which a publisher had asked him at the time to work over into a primer for college use.  There might be a few hundreds to be made there.  He could certainly place some articles in the reviews.  If for the next twelve months he ruthlessly eliminated everything from his life that did not bring in money, he could perhaps push his earnings for the next year to three thousand dollars, which would be enough to see him through....

And busy with thoughts like these, he came home to Surface’s pleasant little house, and was greeted by the old man with kindness and good cheer.