Oh, but did he not have a clever father, a stealthy, cunning, merciless
father, soft-winged, foul-eyed, hungry-taloned, flitting noiselessly in
circles, that grew ever and ever narrower, sure, and unfaltering to the
final triumphant swoop! Or no--Rather a coiled and quiescent father,
horrible-eyed, lying in slimy rings at the foot of the tree, basilisk
gaze fixed upward, while the enthralled bird fluttered hopelessly down,
twig by twig, ever nearer and nearer.

But no--his metaphors were very bad; he was sentimentalizing,
rhetorizing, a thing that he particularly abhorred. Not in any sense was
he the pitiful prey of his father, the hawk or the snake. Rather was he
glad that, after long doubt and perplexity, at last he knew. For that
was the passion of all his chaste life: to know the truth and to face it
without fear.

Surface stirred slightly in his bed, and Queed, turning his eyes, let
them rest briefly on that repulsive face. _His father_!... And he must
wear that name and shoulder that infamy forevermore!

* * * * *

The nurse came back and relieved him of his vigil. He descended the
stairs to his solitary dinner. And as he went, and while he lingered
over food which he did not eat, his thoughts withdrew from his terrible
inheritance to centre anew on the fact that, within an hour, he was to
see Miss Weyland again.

The prospect drew him while it even more strongly repelled.

For a week he had hesitated, unable to convince himself that he was
justified in telling Miss Weyland at once the whole truth about himself,
his father, and her money. There was much on the side of delay. Surface
might die at any moment, and this would relieve his son from the
smallest reproach of betraying a confidence: the old man himself had
said that everything was to be made known when he died. On the other
hand Surface might get well, and if he did, he ought to be given a final
chance to make the restitution himself. Besides this, there was the
great uncertainty about the money. Queed had no idea how much it was, or
where it was, or whether or not, upon Surface's death, he himself was to
get it by bequest. But all through these doubts, passionately protesting
against them, had run his own insistent feeling that it was not right to
conceal the truth, even under such confused conditions--not, at least,
from the one person who was so clearly entitled to know it. This feeling
had reached a climax even be