symbolic: the great shock had come and passed within the
smoking of an inch of cigarette. The pretty room was as it was before.
Pale sunshine still flickered on the swelling curtain. The leather
desk-clock gayly ticked the passing seconds. The young man's clean-cut
face looked as quiet as ever.

Upon Queed the old man fastened his fearless black eyes.

"I meant to tell you all this some day," he said, in quite a natural
voice. "Now the day has come a little sooner than I had meant--that is
all. I know that my confidence is safe with you--till I die."

"I think you have nothing to fear by trusting me," said Queed, and added
at once: "But you need tell me nothing unless you prefer."

A kind of softness shone for a moment in Surface's eyes. "Nobody could
look at your face," he said gently, "and ever be afraid to trust you."

The telephone rang, and Queed could answer it by merely putting out his
hand. It was West, from the office, asking that he report for work that
night, as he himself was compelled to be away.

Presently Surface began talking; talking in snatches, more to himself
than to his young friend, rambling backward over his broken life in
passionate reminiscence. He talked a long time thus, while the daylight
faded and dusk crept into the room, and then night; and Queed listened,
giving him all the rein he wanted and saying never a word himself.

"... Pray your gods," said Surface, "that you never have such reason to
hate your fellow-men as I have had, my boy. For that has been the
keynote of my unhappy life. God, how I hated them all, and how I do
yet!... Not least Weyland, with his ostentatious virtue, his
holier-than-thou kindness, his self-righteous magnanimity tossed even to
me ... the broken-kneed idol whom others passed with averted face, and
there was none so poor to do me reverence...."

So this, mused Queed, was the meaning of the old professor's invincible
dislike for Miss Weyland, which he had made so obvious in the
boarding-house that even Mr. Bylash commented on it. He had never been
able to forgive her father's generosity, which he had so terribly
betrayed; her name and her blood rankled and festered eternally in the
heart of the faithless friend and the striped trustee.

Henderson, the ancient African who attended the two men, knocked upon
the shut door with the deprecatory announcement that he had twice rung
the supper-bell.

"Take the things back to the kitchen, Henderson," said Queed