one immediately necessary: he must
see her at once, to-night, and clear himself wholly of this cruel
suspicion. And yet ... he could never clear himself of her _having_
suspected him; he understood that, and it seemed to him a terrible
thing. No matter how humble her contrition, how abject her apologies,
nothing could ever get back of what was written, or change the fact that
she had believed him capable of that.

The young man pursued his thoughts over three miles of city streets, and
returned to the house of Surface.

The hour was 6.30. He took the nurse's seat by the bedside of his father
and sent her away to her dinner.

There was a single gas-light in the sick-room, turned just high enough
for the nurse to read her novels. The old man lay like a log, though
breathing heavily; under the flickering light, his face looked ghastly.
It had gone all to pieces; advanced old age had taken possession of it
in a night. Moreover the truth about the auburn mustaches and goatee was
coming out in snowy splotches; the fading dye showed a mottle of red and
white not agreeable to the eye. Here was not merely senility, but
ignoble and repulsive senility.

His father!... his _father!_ O God! How much better to have sprung, as
he once believed, from the honest loins of Tim Queed!

The young man averted his eyes from the detestable face of his father,
and let his thoughts turn inward upon himself. For the first time in all
his years, he found himself able to trace his own life back to its
source, as other men do. A flying trip to New York, and two hours with
Tim Queed, had answered all questions, cleared up all doubts. First of
all, it had satisfied him that there was no stain upon his birth.
Surface's second marriage had been clandestine, but it was genuine; in
Newark the young man found the old clergyman who had officiated at the
ceremony. His mother, it seemed, had been Miss Floretta May Earle, a
"handsome young opery singer," of a group, so Tim said, to which the
gentleman, his father, had been very fond of giving his "riskay little
bacheldore parties."

Tim's story, in fact, was comprehensive at all points. He had been Mr.
Surface's coachman and favorite servant in the heyday of the Southern
apostate's metropolitan glories. About a year before the final
catastrophe, Surface's affairs being then in a shaky condition, the
servants had been dismissed, the handsome house sold, and the financier,
in a desperate effort to save h