His face darkened once more as Hall hurried away, leaving him alone.  He drew out the piece of paper from his pocket and stared at it again.  Yes; it was the one he had sent to his wife.  How did Van Loo get hold of it?  Was he at the hotel that night?  Had he picked it up in the hall or passage when the servant dropped it?  When Hall handed him the paper and he first recognized it a fiendish thought, followed by a spasm of more fiendish rage, had sent the blood to his face.  But his crude common sense quickly dismissed that suggestion of his wife’s complicity with Van Loo.  But had she seen him passing through the hotel that night, and had sought to draw from him some knowledge of his early intercourse with the child, and confessed everything, and even produced the paper with his signature as a proof of identity?  Women had been known to do such desperate things.  Perhaps she disbelieved her son’s aversion to her, and was trying to sound Van Loo.  As for the forged words by Van Loo, and the use he had put them to, he cared little.  He believed the man was capable of forgery; indeed, he suddenly remembered that in the old days his son had spoken innocently, but admiringly, of Van Loo’s wonderful chirographical powers and his faculty of imitating the writings of others, and how he had even offered to teach him.  A new and exasperating thought came into his feverish consciousness.  What if Van Loo, in teaching the boy, had even made use of him as an innocent accomplice to cover up his own tricks!  The suggestion was no question of moral ethics to Steptoe, nor of his son’s possible contamination, although since the night of the big strike he had held different views; it was simply a fierce, selfish jealousy that another might have profited by the lad’s helplessness and inexperience.  He had been tormented by this jealousy before in his son’s liking for Van Loo.  He had at first encouraged his admiration and imitative regard for this smooth swindler’s graces and accomplishments, which, though he scorned them himself, he was, after the common parental infatuation, willing that the boy should profit by.  Incapable, through his own consciousness, of distinguishing between Van Loo’s superficial polish and the true breeding of a gentleman, he had only looked upon it as an equipment for his son which might be serviceable to himself.  He had told his wife the truth when he informed her of Van Loo’s fears of being reminded of their former intimacy; but he had not told her how its discontinuance after they had left Heavy Tree Hill had affected her son, and how he still cherished his old admiration for that specious rascal.  Nor had he told her how this had stung him, through his own selfish greed of the boy’s affection.  Yet now that it was possible that she had met Van Loo that evening, she might have become aware of Van Loo’s power over her child.  How she would exult, for all her pretended hatred of Van Loo!  How, perhaps, they had plotted together!  How Van Loo might have become aware of the place where his son was kept, and have been bribed by the mother to tell her!  He stopped in a whirl of giddy fancies.  His strong common sense in all other things had been hitherto proof against such idle dreams or suggestions; but the very strength of his parental love and jealousy had awakened in him at last the terrors of imagination.