Yet he had gone on
fatuously swallowing the story that the money of which the old rogue was
so free represented nothing but the savings of a thrifty schoolteacher.
A dozen things came back to him now to give the lie to that tale. He
thought of the costly books that Surface was constantly buying; the
expensive repairs he had made in his rented house; the wine that stood
on the dinner-table every night; the casual statement from the old man
that he meant to retire from the school at the end of the present
session. Was there ever a teacher who could live like this after a dozen
years' roving work? And the probability was that Surface had never
worked at all until, returning to his own city, he had needed a position
as a cover and a blind.
Mathematical computations danced through the young man's brain. He
figured that their present scale of living must run anywhere from $3500
to $5000 a year. Surface's income from the school was known to be $900 a
year. His income from his lodger was $390 a year. This difference
between, say $4000 and $1290, was $2710 a year, or 4 per cent on some
$70,000.
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