“Won’t you shake hands?”

Turning, she gave him briefly the tips of fingers cold as ice.  As their hands touched, a sudden tragic sense overwhelmed him that here was a farewell indeed.  The light contact set him shaking; and for a moment his iron self-control, which covered torments she never guessed at, almost forsook him.

“Good-by.  And may that God of yours who loves all that is beautiful and sweet be good to you—­now and always.”

She made no reply; he wheeled, abruptly, and left her.  But on the threshold he was checked by the sound of her voice.

The interview, from the beginning, had profoundly affected her; these last words, so utterly unlike his usual manner of speech, had shaken her through and through.  For some moments she had been miserably aware that, if he would but tell her everything and throw himself on her mercy, she would instantly forgive him.  And now, when she saw that she could not make him do that, she felt that tiny door, which she had thought double-locked forever, creaking open, and heard herself saying in a small, desperate voice:—­

“You did write it, didn’t you?”

But he paused only long enough to look at her and say, quite convincingly:—­

“You need hardly ask that—­now—­need you?”

* * * * *

He went home, to his own bedroom, lit his small student-lamp, and sat down at his table to begin a new article.  The debt of money which was his patrimony required of him that he should make every minute tell now.

In old newspaper files at the State Library, he had found the facts of his father’s defalcations.  The total embezzlement from the Weyland estate, allowing for $14,000 recovered in the enforced settlement of Surface’s affairs, stood at $203,000.  But that was twenty-seven years ago, and in all this time interest had been doubling and redoubling:  simple interest, at 4%, brought it to $420,000; compound interest to something like $500,000, due at the present moment.  Against this could be credited only his father’s “nest-egg”—­provided always that he could find it—­estimated at not less than $50,000.  That left his father’s son staring at a debt of $450,000, due and payable now.  It was of course, utterly hopeless.  The interest on that sum alone was $18,000 a year, and he could not earn $5000 a year to save his immortal soul.

So the son knew that, however desperately he might strive, he would go to his grave more deeply in debt to Sharlee Weyland than he stood at this moment.  But of course it was the trying that chiefly counted.  The fifty thousand dollars, which he would turn over to her as soon as he got it—­how he was counting on a sum as big as that!—­would be a help; so would the three or four thousand a year which he counted on paying toward keeping down the interest.  This money in itself would be a good.  But much better than that, it would stand as a gage that the son acknowledged and desired to atone for his father’s dishonor.