man was very young just now, but would be
plenty old enough before they would have need of him.

Mr. Bangor once more winked at the six. "Why, Plonny, I thought you were
rooting for Charles Gardenia West."

"Then there's two of ye," said Plonny, dryly, "he being the other one."

He removed his unlighted cigar, and spat loudly into a tall brass
cuspidor, which he had taken the precaution to place for just such
emergencies.

"Meachy," said Plonny, slowly, "I wouldn't give the job of dog-catcher
to a man you couldn't trust to stand by his friends."

XXVIII

_How Words can be like Blows, and Blue Eyes stab deep; how Queed
sits by a Bedside and reviews his Life; and how a Thought leaps at
him and will not down._

In the first crushing burst of revelation, Queed had had a wild impulse
to wash his hands of everything, and fly. He would pack Surface off to a
hospital; dispose of the house; escape back to Mrs. Paynter's; forget
his terrible knowledge, and finally bury it with Surface. His reason
fortified the impulse at every point. He owed less than nothing to his
father; he had not the slightest responsibility either toward him or for
him; to acknowledge the relation between them would do no conceivable
good to anybody. He would go back to the Scriptorium, and all would be
as it had been before.

But when the moment came either to go or to stay, another and deeper
impulse rose against this one, and beat it down. Within him a voice
whispered that though he might go back to the Scriptorium, he would
never be as he had been before. Whether he acknowledged the relation or
not, it was still there. And, in time, his reason brought forth material
to fortify this impulse, too: it came out in brief, grim sentences which
burned themselves into his mind. Surface was his father. To deny the
primal blood-tie was not honorable. The sins of the fathers descended to
the children. To suppress Truth was the crowning blasphemy.

Queed did not go. He stayed, resolved, after a violent struggle--it was
all over in the first hour of his discovery--to bear his burden,
shouldering everything that his sonship involved.

By day and by night the little house stood very quiet. Its secret
remained inviolate; the young man was still Mr. Queed, the old one
still Professor Nicolovius, who had suffered the last of his troublesome
"strokes." Inside the darkened windows, life moved on silent heels. The
doctor came, did nothing