Surface stirred slightly in his bed, and Queed, turning his eyes, let them rest briefly on that repulsive face. His father!...  And he must wear that name and shoulder that infamy forevermore!

* * * * *

The nurse came back and relieved him of his vigil.  He descended the stairs to his solitary dinner.  And as he went, and while he lingered over food which he did not eat, his thoughts withdrew from his terrible inheritance to centre anew on the fact that, within an hour, he was to see Miss Weyland again.

The prospect drew him while it even more strongly repelled.

For a week he had hesitated, unable to convince himself that he was justified in telling Miss Weyland at once the whole truth about himself, his father, and her money.  There was much on the side of delay.  Surface might die at any moment, and this would relieve his son from the smallest reproach of betraying a confidence:  the old man himself had said that everything was to be made known when he died.  On the other hand Surface might get well, and if he did, he ought to be given a final chance to make the restitution himself.  Besides this, there was the great uncertainty about the money.  Queed had no idea how much it was, or where it was, or whether or not, upon Surface’s death, he himself was to get it by bequest.  But all through these doubts, passionately protesting against them, had run his own insistent feeling that it was not right to conceal the truth, even under such confused conditions—­not, at least, from the one person who was so clearly entitled to know it.  This feeling had reached a climax even before he met the girl this afternoon.  Somehow that meeting had served to precipitate his decision.  After all, Surface had had both his chance and his warning.

That his sonship would make him detestable in Miss Weyland’s sight was highly probable, but he could not let the fear of that keep him silent.  His determination to tell her the essential facts had come now, at last, as a kind of corollary to his instant necessity of straightening out the reformatory situation.  This latter necessity had dominated his thought ever since the chance meeting in the post-office.  And as his mind explored the subject, it ramified, and grew more complicated and oppressive with every step of the way.

It gradually became plain to him that, in clearing himself of responsibility for the Post’s editorial, he would have to put West in a very unpleasant position.  He would have to convict him, not only of having written the perfidious article, but of having left another man under the reproach of having written it.  But no; it could not be said that he was putting West in this position.  West had put himself there.  It was he who had written the article, and it was he who had kept silent about it.  Every man must accept the responsibility for his own acts, or the world would soon be at sixes and sevens.  In telling Miss Weyland the truth about the matter, as far as that went, he would be putting himself in an unpleasant position.  Nobody liked to see one man “telling on” another.  He did not like it himself, as he remembered, for instance, in the case of young Brown in the Blames College hazing affair.