The day following his discovery of Leila Mills in the boathouse, Bruce remained in his apartment. He was not a little awed by the instinct that had led him to the river--the unlikeliest of places in which to seek the runaway girl. The poor little drugged body lying there in the cold room; her deep sigh and the touch of her hand on his face as he took her up, and more poignantly the look in Franklin Mills’s face when they met at the door, remained with him, and he knew that these were things he could never forget.... There was more of superstition and mysticism in his blood than he had believed. Lounging about his rooms, staring down at the bleak street as it whitened in a brisk snowfall, his thoughts ranged the wide seas of doubt and faith. Life was only a corridor between two doors of mystery. Petty and contemptible seemed the old familiar teachings about God. Men were not rejecting God; they were merely misled as to his nature. The spirit of man was only an infinitesimal particle of the spirit that was God. No other person he had ever talked with had offered so reasonable a solution of the problem as Millicent. Again he went over their talk on the golf course. Millicent had the clue--the clue to a reality no less tangible and plausible because it was born of unreality. And here was the beginning of wisdom: to abandon the attempt to explain all things when so manifestly life would become intolerable if the walls of mystery through which man moves were battered down. As near as he was able to express it, the soul required room--all infinity, indeed, as the playground for its proper exercise. The freer a man’s spirit the greater its capacity for loving and serving its neighbor souls. Somewhere in the illimitable horizons of which Millicent dreamed it was imaginable that Something august and supreme dominated the universe--Something only belittled by every attempt to find a name for it.... Strange reflections for a healthy young mind in a stalwart, vigorous young body! Bruce hardly knew himself today. The scent of Leila’s hair as he bore her out of the boathouse had stirred a tenderness in his heart that was strange to him. He hoped Franklin Mills had dealt leniently with Leila. He had no idea what the man would do or say after finding his daughter in such a plight. He considered telephoning Mills’s house to ask about her, but dismissed the thought. His duty was discharged the moment he gave her into her father’s keeping; in all the circumstances an inquiry would be an impertinence.