He turned to the newspaper and reread the report of the real estate transaction, then opened to the personal and society page, where he found this item: Miss Leila Mills of Jefferson Avenue gave a luncheon yesterday at the Faraway Country Club for her house guest, Miss Helene Ridgeway of Cincinnati. The decorations were purple asters and pink roses. Helene Ridgeway he knew; she had been the college chum of one of his Laconia cousins. He had not realized the strain he had undergone in the past year till he saw the familiar name. The nightmare pictures of his year-long speculations faded; whatever else Mills might be he was at least a reputable citizen, and this was something to be thankful for; and obviously he was not poor and helpless. The Leila referred to must be Mills’s daughter, and the same blood ran in her veins as in his own. Bruce flung the paper away; touched his forehead, found it covered with perspiration. He paced the floor till he had quieted himself, paused at the window, finding relief in the lights and sounds of the street, the bells and whistles of trains at the railway station somewhere in the distance. The world surged round him, indifferent to his hopes and aims and fears. He must keep tight hold of himself.... His mother had urged him to think kindly of Franklin Mills; and yet, now that the man was within reach, a contempt that bordered upon hatred filled his heart. For his mother his love turned for the moment to pity. He recalled the look she had bent upon him at times when he and his putative father had talked happily together. John Storrs had lavished an unusual devotion upon his wife to the end of his life. The wrong done him seemed monstrous as Bruce thought of it, remembering Storrs’s pride in him, the sympathetic interest he had taken in his education, the emotion with which they had parted when Bruce went away to war. There was a vast pathos in all this--in the very ignorance of his wife’s infidelity that John Storrs had carried to his grave. CHAPTER TWO I