She reseated herself on the log.  MacRae sat down beside her.  He looked at her searchingly.  He could not keep his eyes away.  A curious inconsistency was revealed to him.  He sat beside Betty, responding to the potent stimuli of her nearness and wishing pettishly that she were a thousand miles away, so that he would not be troubled by the magic of her lips and eyes and unruly hair, the musical cadences of her voice.  There was a subtle quality of expectancy about her, as if she sat there waiting for him to say something, do something, as if her mere presence were powerful to compel him to speak and act as she desired.  MacRae realized the fantasy of those impressions.  Betty sat looking at him calmly, her hands idle in her lap.  If there were in her soul any of the turmoil that was fast rising in his, it was not outwardly manifested by any sign whatever.  For that matter, MacRae knew that he himself was placid enough on the surface.  Nor did he feel the urge of inconsequential speech.  There was no embarrassment in that mutual silence, only the tug of a compelling desire to take her in his arms, which he must resist.

“There are times,” Betty said at last, “when you live up to your nickname with a vengeance.”

“There are times,” MacRae replied slowly, “when that is the only wise thing for a man to do.”

“And you, I suppose, rather pride yourself on being wise in your day and generation.”

There was gentle raillery in her tone.

“I don’t like you to be sarcastic,” he said.

“I don’t think you like me sarcastic or otherwise,” Betty observed, after a moment’s silence.

“But I do,” he protested.  “That’s the devil of it.  I do—­and you know I do.  It would be a great deal better if I didn’t.”

Betty’s fingers began to twist in her lap.  The color rose faintly in her smooth cheeks.  Her eyes turned to the sea.

“I don’t know why,” she said gently.  “I’d hate to think it would.”

MacRae did not find any apt reply to that.  His mind was in an agonized muddle, in which he could only perceive one or two things with any degree of clearness.  Betty loved him.  He was sure of that.  He could tell her that he loved her.  And then?  Therein arose the conflict.  Marriage was the natural sequence of love.  And when he contemplated marriage with Betty he found himself unable to detach her from her background, in which lurked something which to MacRae’s imagination loomed sinister, hateful.  To make peace with Horace Gower—­granting that Gower was willing for such a consummation—­for love of his daughter struck MacRae as something very near to dishonor.  And if, contrariwise, he repeated to Betty the ugly story which involved her father and his father, she would be harassed by irreconcilable forces even if she cared enough to side with him against her own people.  MacRae was gifted with acute perception, in some things.  He said to himself despairingly—­nor was it the first time that he had said it—­that you cannot mix oil and water.