"But I'll not permit you to do it, do you hear?" continued Surface, his face ablaze, his lower lip trembling and twitching, as it does sometimes with the very old. "You need some discipline, my boy. Need some discipline--and you shall have it. You will continue to live with me exactly as you have heretofore, only henceforward I shall direct your movements and endeavor to improve your manners." He swayed slightly where he stood, and Queed's tenseness suddenly relaxed. Pity rose in his heart above furious resentment; he put out his hand and touched the old man's arm. "Control yourself," he said in an iron voice. "Come--I will help you to bed before I go." Surface shook himself free, and laughed unpleasantly. "Go! Didn't you hear me tell you that you were not going? Who do you think I am that you can flout and browbeat and threaten--" "Come! Let us go up to bed--" "Who do you think I am!" repeated Surface, bringing his twitching face nearer, his voice breaking to sudden shrillness. "Who do you think I am, I say?" Queed thought the old man had gone off his head, and indeed he looked it. He began soothingly: "You are--" "I'm your father! Your _father_, do you hear!" cried Surface. "_You're my son--Henry G. Surface, Jr.!_" This time, Queed, looking with a wild sudden terror into the flaming eyes, knew that he heard the truth from Surface at last. The revelation broke upon him in a stunning flash. He sprang away from the old man with a movement of loathing unspeakable. "Father!" he said, in a dull curious whisper. "_O God! Father!_" Surface gazed at him, his upper lip drawn up into his old purring sneer. "So that is how you feel about it, my son?" he inquired suavely, and suddenly crumpled down upon the floor. * * * * * The young man shook him by the shoulder, but he did not stir. Henderson came running at the sound of the fall, and together they bore the old man, breathing, but inert as the dead, to his room. In an hour, the doctor had come and gone. In two hours, a trained nurse was sitting by the bed as though she had been there always. The doctor called it a "stroke," superinduced by a "shock." He said that Professor Nicolovius might live for a week, or a year, but was hardly likely to speak again on this side the dark river that runs round the world. XXVII _Sharlee Weyland reads the Morning Post; of Rev. Mr. Dayne's Fight at Ephesus and the Telephone Message that never came; of the Editor's Comment upon the Assistant Editor's Resignation, which perhaps lacked Clarity; and of how Eight Men elect a Mayor._ Next morning, in the first moment she had, Sharlee Weyland read the Post's editorial on the reformatory. And as she read she felt as though the skies had fallen, and the friendly earth suddenly risen up and smitten her.