“I never saw dad so thin and old-looking,” he muttered.  “Why, his hair is nearly white.  He’s a wreck.  How long has he been sick?”

“Four days,” Dolly answered.  “But he hasn’t grown old and thin in four days, Jack.  He’s been going downhill for months.  Too much work.  Too much worry also, I think—­out there around the Rock every morning at daylight, every evening till dark.  It hasn’t been a good season for the rowboats.”

MacRae stirred uneasily in his chair.  He didn’t understand why his father should have to drudge in a trolling boat.  They had always fished salmon, so far back as he could recall, but never of stark necessity.  He nursed his chin in his hand and thought.  Mostly he thought with a constricted feeling in his throat of how frail and old his father had grown, the slow-smiling, slow-speaking man who had been father and mother and chum to him since he was an urchin in knee breeches.  He recalled him at their parting on a Vancouver railway platform,—­tall and rugged, a lean, muscular, middle-aged man, bidding his son a restrained farewell with a longing look in his eyes.  Now he was a wasted shadow.  Jack MacRae shivered.  He seemed to hear the sable angel’s wing-beats over the house.

He looked up at the girl at last.

“You’re worn out, aren’t you, Dolly?” he said.  “Have you been caring for him alone?”

“Uncle Peter helped,” she answered.  “But I’ve stayed up and worried, and I am tired, of course.  It isn’t a very cheerful home-coming, is it, Jack?  And he was so pleased when he got your cable from London.  Poor old man!”

MacRae got up suddenly.  But the clatter of his shoes on the floor recalled him to himself.  He sat down again.

“I’ve got to do something,” he asserted.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Dolly Ferrara said wistfully.  “He can’t be moved.  You can’t get a doctor or a nurse.  The country’s full of people down with the flu.  There’s only one chance and I’ve taken that.  I wrote a message to Doctor Laidlaw—­you remember he used to come here every summer to fish—­and Uncle Peter went across to Sechelt to wire it.  I think he’ll come if he can, or send some one, don’t you?  They were such good friends.”

“That was a good idea,” MacRae nodded.  “Laidlaw will certainly come if it’s possible.”

“And I can keep cool cloths on his head and feed him broth and give him the stuff Doctor Harper left.  He said it depended mostly on his own resisting power.  If he could throw it off he would.  If not—­”

She turned her palms out expressively.

“How did you come?” she asked presently.

“Across from Qualicum in a fish carrier to Folly Bay.  I borrowed a boat at the Bay and rowed up.”

“You must be hungry,” she said.  “I’ll get you something to eat.”

“I don’t feel much like eating,”—­MacRae followed her into the kitchen—­“but I can drink a cup of tea.”