“Just gadding about, as usual! But I’m in plenty of time, Dada. Please thank Mr. Storrs for coming home with me. Good-night and thank you some more!” She darted into the house, leaving Bruce confronting her father. “Oh, Mr. Storrs!” The emphasis on the name was eloquent of Mills’s surprise that Bruce was on his threshold. Bruce had decided that any explanations required were better left to Leila, who was probably an adept in explanations. He was about to turn away when Mills stepped outside. “We’re entertaining tonight,” he said pleasantly. “I was a little afraid something had happened to my daughter.” A certain dignity of utterance marked his last words--my daughter. He threw into the phrase every possible suggestion of paternal pride. Bruce, halfway down the steps, paused until Mills had concluded his remark. Then lifting his hat with a murmured good-night, he hurried toward the gate. An irresistible impulse caused him to look back. Mills remained just inside the entry, his figure clearly defined by the overhead lights, staring toward the street. Seeing Bruce look back, he went quickly into the house and the heavy door boomed upon him. Bruce walked to the nearest street car line and rode downtown for dinner. The fact that Mills was waiting at the door for his daughter was not without its significance, hinting at a constant uneasiness for her safety beyond ordinary parental solicitude. What Constance had said that afternoon about Mills came back to him. He was oppressed by a sense of something tragic in Mills’s life--the tragedy of a failure that wore outwardly the guise of success. In spite of a strong effort of will to obliterate these thoughts he found his memory dragging into his consciousness odd little pictures of Mills--fragmentary snapshots, more vivid and haunting than complete portraits: the look Mills gave him the first time they met at the Country Club; Mills’s shoulders and the white line of his collar above his dinner coat as he left the Hardens’; and now the quick change from irritation to relief and amiable courtesy when he admitted Leila. Henderson and Millicent and now today Constance had given him hints of Mills’s character, and Bruce found himself trying to reconcile and unify their comments and fit them into his own inferences and conclusions. The man was not without his fascinations as a subject for analysis. Behind that gracious exterior there must be another identity either less noble or finer than the man the world knew.... Before he slept, Bruce found it necessary to combat an apprehension that, if he continued to hear Mills dissected and analyzed, he might learn to pity the man. IV