MacRae sat on the Blanco’s deck, nursing his chin in his palms, staring at Poor Man’s Rock with a grim satisfaction.  About that lonely headland strange things had come to pass.  Donald MacRae had felt his first abiding grief there and cried his hurt to a windy sky.  He had lived his last years snatching a precarious living from the seas that swirled about the Rock.  The man who had been the club with which fate bludgeoned old Donald was making his last stand in sight of the Rock, just as Donald MacRae had done.  And when they were all dead and gone, Poor Man’s Rock would still bare its brown hummock of a head between tides, the salmon would still play along the kelp beds, in the eddies about the Rock.  Other men would ply the gear and take the silver fish.  It would all be as if it had never happened.  The earth and the sea endured and men were passing shadows.

Afternoon waned.  Faint, cool airs wavered off the land, easing the heat and the sun-glare.  MacRae saw Betty and her father come down to the beach.  She helped him slide his rowboat afloat.  Then Gower joined the rowers who were putting out to the Rock for the evening run.  He passed close by the Blanco but MacRae gave him scant heed.  His eyes were all for the girl ashore.  Betty sat on a log, bareheaded in the sun.  MacRae had a feeling that she looked at him.  And she would be thinking,—­God only knew what.

In MacRae’s mind arose the inevitable question,—­one that he had choked back dozens of times:  Was it worth while to hurt her so, and himself, because their fathers had fought, because there had been wrongs and injustices?  MacRae shook himself impatiently.  He was backsliding.  Besides that unappeasable craving for her, vivid images of her with tantalizing mouth, wayward shining hair, eyes that answered the passion in his own, besides these luring pictures of her which troubled him sometimes both in waking hours and sleeping, there was a strange, deep-seated distrust of Betty because she was the daughter of her father.  That was irrational, and Jack MacRae knew it was irrational.  But he could not help it.  It colored his thought of her.  It had governed his reactions.

MacRae himself could comprehend all too clearly the tragedy of his father’s life.  But he doubted if any one else could.  He shrank from unfolding it even to Betty,—­even to make clear to her why his hand must be against her father.  MacRae knew, or thought he knew—­he had reasoned the thing out many times in the last few months—­that Betty would not turn to him against her own flesh and blood without a valid reason.  He could not, even, in the name of love, cut her off from all that she had been, from all that had made her what she was, and make her happy.  And MacRae knew that if they married and Betty were not happy and contented, they would both be tigerishly miserable.  There was only one possible avenue, one he could not take.  He could not seek peace with Gower, even for Betty’s sake.