Franklin Mills stood by one of the broad windows in his private office gazing across the smoky industrial district of his native city. With his hands thrust into his trousers’ pockets, he was a picture of negligent ease. His face was singularly free of the markings of time. His thick, neatly trimmed hair with its even intermixture of white added to his look of distinction. His business suit of dark blue with an obscure green stripe was evidently a recent creation of his tailor, and a wing collar with a neatly tied polka-dot cravat contributed further to the impression he gave of a man who had a care for his appearance. The gray eyes that looked out over the city narrowed occasionally as some object roused his attention--a freight train crawling on the outskirts or some disturbance in the street below. Then he would resume his reverie as though enjoying his sense of immunity from the fret and jar of the world about him. _Bruce Storrs._ The name of the young man he had met at the Country Club lingered disturbingly in his memory. He had heard someone ask that night where Storrs came from, and Bud Henderson, his sponsor, had been ready with the answer, “Laconia, Ohio.” Mills had been afraid to ask the question himself. Long-closed doors swung open slowly along the dim corridor of memory and phantom shapes emerged--among them a figure Franklin Mills recognized as himself. Swiftly he computed the number of years that had passed since, in his young manhood, he had spent a summer in the pleasant little town, sent there by his father to act as auditor of a manufacturing concern in which Franklin Mills III for a time owned an interest. Marian Storrs was a lovely young being--vivacious, daring, already indifferent to the man to whom she had been married two years.... He had been a beast to take advantage of her, to accept all that she had yielded to him with a completeness and passion that touched him poignantly now as she lived again in his memory.... Was this young man, Bruce Storrs, her son? He was a splendid specimen, distinctly handsome, with the air of breeding that Mills valued. He turned from the window and walked idly about the room, only to return to his contemplation of the hazy distances. The respect of his fellow man, one could see, meant much to him. He was Franklin Mills, the fourth of the name in succession in the Mid-western city, enjoying an unassailable social position and able to command more cash at a given moment than any other man in the community. Nothing was so precious to Franklin Mills as his peace of mind, and here was a problem that might forever menace that peace. The hope that the young man himself knew nothing did not abate the hateful, hideous question ... was he John Storrs’s son or his own? Surely Marian Storrs could not have told the boy of that old episode....