have liked to tell him so.  But I couldn’t.  He was a dour Scotchman and I suppose he hated me, although he kept it to himself.  I suppose he loved Bessie.  I know I did.  Perhaps he cherished hatred of me for wrecking his dream, and so saw my hand in things where it never was.  But he was wrong.  Bessie would have wrecked it and him too.  She would have whined and sniffled about being a poor man’s wife, once she learned what it was to be poor.  She could never understand anything but a silk-lined existence.  She loved herself and her own illusions.  She would have driven him mad with her petty whims, her petty emotions.  She doesn’t know the meaning of loyalty, consideration, or even an open, honest hatred.  And I’ve stood it all these years—­because I don’t shirk responsibilities, and I had brought it on myself.”

He stopped a second, staring out across the Gulf.

“But apart from that one thing, I never consciously or deliberately wronged Donald MacRae.  He may honestly have believed I did.  I have the name of being hard.  I dare say I am.  The world is a hard place.  When I had to choose between walking on a man’s face and having my own walked on, I never hesitated.  There was nothing much to make me soft.  I moved along the same lines as most of the men I know.

“But, I repeat, I never put a straw in your father’s way.  I know that things went against him.  I could see that.  I knew why, too.  He was too square for his time and place.  He trusted men too much.  You can’t always do that.  He was too scrupulously honest.  He always gave the other fellow the best of it.  That alone beat him.  He didn’t always consider his own interest and follow up every advantage.  I don’t think he cared to scramble for money, as a man must scramble for it these days.  He could have held this place if he had cast about for ways to do so.  There were plenty of loopholes.  But he had that old-fashioned honor which doesn’t seek loopholes.  He had borrowed money on it.  He would have taken the coat off his back, beggared himself any day to pay a debt.  Isn’t that right?”

MacRae nodded.

“So this place came into my hands.  It was deliberate on my part—­but only, mind you, when I knew that he was bound to lose it.  Perhaps it was bad judgment on my part.  I didn’t think that he would see it as an end I’d been working for.  As I grew older, I found myself wanting now and then to wipe out that old score between us.  I would have given a good deal to sit down with him over a pipe.  A woman, who wasn’t much as women go, had made us both suffer.  So I built this cottage and came here to stay now and then.  I liked the place.  I liked to think that now he and I were getting to be old men, we could be friends.  But he was too bitter.  And I’m human.  I’ve got a bit of pride.  I couldn’t crawl.  So I never got nearer to him than to see him rowing around the Rock.  And he died full of that bitterness.  I don’t like to think of that.  Still, it cannot be helped.  Do you grasp this, MacRae?  Do you believe me?”