He recalled what the rector of St. Barnabas had said to him the morning he had gone in to inspect the Mills window--that walls do not make the church, that the true edifice is within man’s own breast. Lindley shouldn’t say things like that, to perplex the hearer, baffle him, create a disagreeable uneasiness! This hint of a God whose tabernacle is in every man’s heart was displeasing. Mills didn’t like the idea of carrying God around with him. To grant any such premise would be to open the way for doubts as to his omnipotence in his own world; and Franklin Mills was not ready for that. He groped for a deity who wouldn’t be a nuisance, like a disagreeable guest in the house, upsetting the whole establishment! God should be a convenience, subject to call like a doctor or a lawyer. But how could a man reach Lindley’s God, who wasn’t in the church at all, but within man himself? In his pondering he came back to his own family. He didn’t know Shepherd; he didn’t know Leila. And this was all wrong. He knew Millicent Harden better than he knew either of his children. He had friends who were good pals with their children, and he wondered how they managed it. Maybe it was the spirit of the age that was the trouble. It was a common habit to fix responsibility for all the disturbing moral and social phenomena of the time on the receding World War, or the greed for gain, or the diminished zeal for religion. This brought him again to God; uncomfortable--the reflection that thought in all its circling and tangential excursions does somehow land at that mysterious door.... Leila must be dealt with. She was much too facile in dissimulation. He was confident that no other Mills had ever been like that. When they reached home he followed Leila into her room. He took the cigarette she offered him and sat down in the low rocking chair she pulled out for him--a befrilled feminine contrivance little to his taste. Utterly at a loss as to how he could most effectively reprimand her for her attempted deception and give her to understand that he would never countenance a marriage with Thomas, he was relieved when she took the initiative. “I _was_ naughty, Dada!” she said. “But Freddy was going over to the Burtons’ tonight and I had told him I’d be there--that’s all. I wasn’t just crazy about going to the farm.” She held a match for him, extinguished it with a flourish, and after lighting her own cigarette dropped down on the chaise longue with a weary little sigh. If she had remained standing or had sat down properly in a chair, his rôle as the stern, aggrieved parent would have been simpler. Leila was so confoundedly difficult, so completely what he wished she was not! “About this Thomas----” he began. “Oh, pshaw! Don’t you bother a little tiny bit about him. I’m just teasing him along.” “I must say your talk over the telephone sounded pretty serious to me!” “Oh, bunk! All the girls talk to men that way these days--it doesn’t mean anything!”