I to open this?"

"Oh, as you like," said he, and, removing the spoon, turned a page.

The agent picked up the envelope with anticipations of helpful clues. It
was her business to find out everything that she could about Mr. Queed.
A determinedly moneyless, friendless, and vocationless young man could
not daily stretch his limbs under her aunt's table and retain the Third
Hall Back against more compensatory guests. But the letter proved a
grievous disappointment to her. Inside was a folded sheet of cheap white
paper, apparently torn from a pad. Inside the sheet was a new
twenty-dollar bill. That was all. Apart from the address, there was no
writing anywhere.

Yet the crisp greenback, incognito though it came, indubitably suggested
that Mr. Queed was not an entire stranger to the science of
money-making.

"Ah," said the agent, insinuatingly, "evidently you have _some_
occupation, after all-of--of a productive sort...."

He looked up again with that same air of vexed surprise, as much as to
say: "What! You still hanging around!"

"I don't follow you, I fear."

"I assume that this money comes to you in payment for some--work you
have done--"

"It is an assumption, certainly."

"You can appreciate, perhaps, that I am not idly inquisitive. I
shouldn't--"

"What is it that you wish to know?"

"As to this money--"

"Really, you know as much about it as I do. It came exactly as I handed
it to you: the envelope, the blank paper, and the bill."

"But you know, of course, where it comes from?"

"I can't say I do. Evidently," said Mr. Queed, "it is intended as a
gift."

"Then--perhaps you have a good friend here after all? Some one who has
guessed--"

"I think I told you that I have but two friends, and I know for a
certainty that they are both in New York. Besides, neither of them would
give me twenty dollars."

"But--but--but," said the girl, laughing through her utter
bewilderment--"aren't you interested to know who _did_ give it to you?
Aren't you _curious?_ I assure you that in this city it's not a bit
usual to get money through the mails from anonymous admirers--"

"Nor did I say that this was a usual case. I told you that I didn't
_know_ who sent me this."

"Exactly--"

"But I have an idea. I think my father sent it."

"Oh! Your father ..."

So he had a father, an eccentric but well-to-do father, who, though not
a friend, yet sent in twenty dollars now and then to relieve his son's
necessitie