“Thinking it over will make not the slightest difference in the way I feel—­”

“Perhaps it would if you stopped thinking about it from a purely selfish point of view.  Other—­”

“What?”

“I say,” he repeated dryly, “that you should stop thinking of the matter from a purely selfish point of view.  Don’t you know that that is what you are doing?  You are thinking only whether or not you, personally, desire this money.  Well, other people have an interest in the question besides you.  There is your mother, for example.  Why not consider it from her standpoint?  Why not consider it from—­well, from the standpoint of Mr. Surface?”

“Of Mr. Surface?”

“Certainly.  Suppose that in his old age he has become penitent, and wants to do what he can to right the old wrong.  Would you refuse him absolution by declining to accept your own money?”

“I think it will be time enough to decide that when Mr. Surface asks me for absolution.”

“Undoubtedly.  I have particularly asked, you remember, that you do not make up your mind to anything now.”

“But you,” said she, looking at him steadily enough now—­“I don’t understand how you happen to be here apparently both as my counselor and Mr. Surface’s agent.”

“I have a right to both capacities, I assure you.”

“Or—­have you a habit of being—?”

She left her sentence unended, and he finished it for her in a colorless voice.

“Of being on two sides of a fence, perhaps you were about to say?”

She made no reply.

“That is what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I started to say that,” she answered, “and then I thought better of it.”

She spoke calmly; but she was oddly disquieted by his fixed gaze, and angry with herself for feeling it.

“I will tell you,” said he, “how I happen to be acting in both capacities.”

The marks of his internal struggle broke through upon his face.  For the first time, it occurred to Sharlee, as she looked at the new markings about his straight-cut mouth, that this old young man whom she had commonly seen so matter-of-fact and self-contained, might be a person of stronger emotions than her own.  After all, what did she really know about him?

As if to answer her, his controlled voice spoke.

“Mr. Surface is my father.  I am his son.”

She smothered a little cry. “Your father!”

“My name,” he said, with a face of stone, “is Henry G. Surface, Jr.”

“Your father!” she echoed lifelessly.

Shocked and stunned, she turned her head hurriedly away; her elbow rested on the broad chair-arm, and her chin sank into her hand.  Surface’s son looked at her.  It was many months since he had learned to look at her as at a woman, and that is knowledge that is not unlearned.  His eyes rested upon her piled-up mass of crinkly brown hair; upon the dark curtain of lashes lying on her cheek; upon the firm line of the cheek, which swept so smoothly into the white neck; upon the rounded bosom, now rising and falling so fast; upon the whole pretty little person which could so stir him now to undreamed depths of his being....  No altruism here, Fifi; no self-denial to want to make her happy.