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 himself, had moved off somewhere to modest quarters in a side street.  That was the last Tim heard of his old patron, till the papers printed the staggering news of his arrest.  A few weeks later, Tim one day received a message bidding him come to see his former master in the Tombs.

The disgraced capitalist’s trial was then in its early stages, but he entertained not the smallest hope of acquittal.  Broken and embittered, he confided to his faithful servant that, soon after the break-up of his establishment, he had quietly married a wife; that some weeks earlier she had presented him with a son; and that she now lay at the point of death with but remote chances of recovery.  To supply her with money was impossible, for his creditors, he said, had not only swooped down like buzzards upon the remnant of his fortune, but were now watching his every move under the suspicion that he had managed to keep something back.  All his friends had deserted him as though he were a leper, for his had been the unpardonable sin of being found out.  In all the world there was no equal of whom he was not too proud to ask a favor.

In short, he was about to depart for a long sojourn in prison, leaving behind a motherless, friendless, and penniless infant son.  Would Tim take him and raise him as his own?

While Tim hesitated over this amazing request, Surface leaned forward and whispered a few words in his ear.  He had contrived to secrete a little sum of money, a very small sum, but one which, well invested as it was, would provide just enough for the boy’s keep.  Tim was to receive twenty-five dollars monthly for his trouble and expense; Surface pledged his honor as a gentleman that he would find a way to smuggle this sum to him on the first of every month.  Tim, being in straits at the time, accepted with alacrity.