“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!