Half reclining in the nurse's chair, unseeing eyes on the shaded and shuttered window, for the fiftieth time Queed let his mind go back over his days at Mrs. Paynter's, reading them all anew in the light of his staggering knowledge. With three communications of the most fragmentary sort, his father had had his full will of his son. With six typewritten lines, he had drawn the young man to his side at his own good pleasure. Boarding-house gossip made it known that the son was in peril of ejectment for non-payment of board, and a twenty-dollar bill had been promptly transmitted--at some risk of discovery--to ease his stringency. Last came the mysterious counsel to make friends and to like people, the particular friends and people intended being consolidated, he could understand now, in the person of old Nicolovius. And that message out of the unknown had had its effect: Queed could see that now, at any rate. His father clearly had been satisfied with the result; he appeared as his father no more. Thenceforward he stalked his prey as Nicolovius--with what consummate skill and success! 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.