A brief item in the “Personal and Society” column of an afternoon
newspaper apprised Bruce a few days later of the departure of Mr.
Franklin Mills and Miss Leila Mills for the Mediterranean, they having
abandoned their proposed trip to Bermuda for the longer voyage. Bruce
wondered a little at the change of plans, suspecting that it might in
some degree be a disciplinary measure for Leila’s benefit, a scheme for
keeping her longer under her father’s eye. He experienced a curious new
loneliness at the thought of their absence and then was impatient to
find himself giving them a second thought. A month earlier he would
have been relieved by the knowledge that Mills was gone and that the
wide seas rolled between them. An amazing thing, this! To say they were
nothing to him did not help now as in those first months after he had
established himself in Mills’s town. They meant a good deal to him and
perhaps he meant something to them. It was very odd indeed how he and
the Millses circled about each other.
As he put down the newspaper a note was brought to him at his apartment
by Mills’s chauffeur. It read:
Dear Bruce: You said I might; I can’t just Mr. Storrs you! Trunks at
the station and Dada waiting at the front door. I couldn’t bear the
idea of writing you a note you’d read while I was still in town--so
please consider that I’m throwing you a kiss from the tail end of the
observation car. I could never, never have had the courage to _say_
my thanks to you--if I tried I’d cry and make a general mess of it.
But--I want you to _know_ that I do appreciate it--what you did--in
saving my life and every little thing! I’d probably have died all
right enough in the frightful cold if you hadn’t found me. I really
didn’t know till yesterday, when I wormed it out of Dada, just how
it all happened! I’m simply crushed! I promise I’ll never do such a
thing again. Thank you _loads_, and be sure I’ll never forget. I wish
you were my big brother; I’d just adore being a nice, good little
sister to you. Love and kisses, from
Leila.
He reread it a dozen times in the course of the evening. It was so
like the child--the perverse, affectionate child--that Leila was. “_I
wish you were my big brother._” The sentence had slipped from her
flying pen thoughtlessly, no doubt, but it gave Bruce a twinge. Shep
did not know; Leila did not know! and yet for both of these children of
Franklin Mills he felt a fondness that was beyond ordinary friendship.
Shep could never be, in the highest sense, a companion of his father;
Mills no doubt loved Leila, but he loved her without understanding.
Her warm, passionate heart, the very fact that she and Shep were the
children of Franklin Mills made life difficult for them. Either would
have been happier if they had not been born into the Mills caste. The
Mills money and the Mills position were an encumbrance against which
more or less consciously they were in rebellion.