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.