“Oh, I may be wrong! If you’d ask anybody else about him you’d hear that he’s a leading citizen and a cultivated gentleman, which he is! While of our city’s back-number or paralytic group, he’s far from being ripe for the mortician. One sees him around socially now and then--on occasions when our real nobility shake the moth balls from their dress suits. And that’s characteristic; he has the pride, you might say, of his long connection with the town. If it’s necessary for somebody to bunk a distinguished visitor, Frank Mills opens his door--not that he’s keen to get his name in the village sheet, but he likes for the town to make a good impression--sort of ‘I am a citizen of no mean city,’ like St. Paul or whoever the bird was that said it first. I doubt if the visitors enjoy his entertainments, but they’re probably used to being bored by the gloomy rich.” “There are other children, perhaps? A house like that rather suggests a big family,” Bruce remarked. “The size only indicates Frank’s pride. He’s given only two hostages to fortune. There’s Leila, the daughter. There must have been a naughty little devil in some of the Mills or Shepherd tribe away back yonder, for that girl certainly is a lively little filly. Shep, who is named for his mother’s people, never browsed in the wild-oat fields, but Leila makes up for it. Bounced from seven boarding schools--holds the champeen record there. Her mother passed hence when Leila was about fourteen, and various aunts took a hand in bringing the kid up, but all they got for their trouble was nervous prostration. Frank’s crazy about her--old stuff of doting father bullied by adorable daughter.” “I think I get the picture,” said Bruce soberly as his thoughts caught up and played upon this summary of the history of Franklin Mills. Glancing back at the house as Henderson drove away, Bruce was aware of the irony of his very presence in the town, sent there by the whim of a dying woman to be prepared to aid a man who in no imaginable circumstances could ever require any help it might be in his power to give. His mother had said that she had kept some track of Mills’s life; she could never have realized that he was so secure from any possibility of need. As Bruce thought of it, Henderson had not limned an attractive portrait. Only Mills’s devotion to the daughter, whom Henderson had described in terms that did not conceal his own admiration for the girl, brightened the picture. “What can such a man do with his time in a town like this?” asked Bruce meditatively. “No active business, you say. Shooting billiards and cutting coupons hardly makes an exciting day.”