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He had Fifi and he had Buck yes, Buck; the young lady Charles Weyland had offered him her friendship this very day; and unless he looked alive he would wake up some morning to find that Nicolovius also had captured him as a friend. He was far better off in New York, where days would go by in which he never saw Tim or Murphy Queed. And yet ... did he want to go back?
He shut the door now somewhat puzzled by the young man's marked curtness; but then Nicolovius knew nothing about the turpentine. The broken evening wore on, with progress slower than the laborer's in Problem 71, when he decided to build two rods less a day. At eleven, Miss Miller, who had been to the theatre, breezed in; she wanted a drink of water.
"I don't appear to find," he said easily, "the little passage that so impressed me the day before yesterday. And after all, what would be the use of reading it to you? You impetuous young men will never listen to the wisdom of your elders." Smiling blandly, the subject closed, it might have been forever, Nicolovius reached out toward the table to flick the ash from his cigarette.
He left the table the moment he had absorbed all the supper he wanted. In the hall he ran upon Professor Nicolovius, the impressive-looking master of Greek at Milner's Collegiate School, who, already hatted and overcoated, was drawing on his gloves under the depressed fancy chandelier. The old professor glanced up at the sound of footsteps and favored Queed with a bland smile.
Queed opened the house-door with a latch-key and went upstairs to the comfortable living-room, which faithfully reproduced the old professor's sitting-room at Mrs. Paynter's. Nicolovius, in his black silk cap, was sitting near the open window, reading and smoking a strong cigarette. "Ah, here you are! I was just thinking that you were rather later than usual this evening."
Paynter's, sometimes known as the Scriptorium, but a whole suite of pleasant rooms, upstairs and down, in a nice little house on Duke of Gloucester Street. For Nicolovius had made his contemplated move on the first of May, and Queed had gone with him. It was half-past six o'clock on a pretty summer's evening.
I must have this! I must take this book from you!" interrupted Queed, rather excitedly dragging a fat blue volume from a lower shelf. "Crozier's Civilization and Progress. What a find! I need it badly. I'll just take it with me now, shall I not? Eh?" "I shall be only too happy to have you take it," said Nicolovius, blandly, "and as many others as you care for."
When Surface was released from prison, as the papers announced, there occurred not the smallest change in the status of affairs; except that the monthly remittances now bore the name of Nicolovius, and came from Chicago or some other city in the west. More years passed; and at last, one day, after a lapse of nearly a quarter of a century, the unexpected happened, as it really will sometimes.
A chair-leg scraped, and Professor Nicolovius was standing, bowing in his sardonic way to Mrs. Paynter. "Since I have happened to hear it often, madam, through Major Brooke's tireless kindness, you will perhaps be so good as to excuse me." And he stalked out of the room, head up, his auburn goatee stabbing the atmosphere before him, in rather a heavy silence.
These acts which confer benefits on others," he continued, "so peculiarly commended by your religion, are conceived by it to work moral good to the doer. "Mr. Queed," said Sharlee, briskly interrupting his exegetical words, "I believe you are going off with Professor Nicolovius chiefly because you think he needs you!" He looked up sharply, much surprised and irritated.
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