“That must have been she sitting on the couch,” Jack MacRae whispered to himself, “that middle-aged woman with the faded rose-leaf face.  Lord, Lord, how things get twisted!”

Though they so closed the avenue to a mesalliance, still their pride must have smarted because of that clandestine affection, that boldly attempted elopement.  Most of all, young Gower must have hated MacRae—­with almost the same jealous intensity that Donald MacRae must for a time have hated him—­because Gower apparently never forgot and never forgave.  Long after Donald MacRae outgrew that passion Gower had continued secretly to harass him.  Certain things could not be otherwise accounted for, Donald MacRae wrote to his son.  Gower functioned in the salmon trade, in timber, in politics.  In whatever MacRae set on foot, he ultimately discerned the hand of Gower, implacable, hidden, striking at him from under cover.

And so in a land and during a period when men created fortunes easily out of nothing, or walked carelessly over golden opportunities, Donald MacRae got him no great store of worldly goods, whereas Horace Gower, after one venture in which he speedily dissipated an inherited fortune, drove straight to successful outcome in everything he touched.  By the time young Jack MacRae outgrew the Island teachers and must go to Vancouver for high school and then to the University of British Columbia, old Donald had been compelled to borrow money on his land to meet these expenses.

Young Jack, sitting by the fire, winced when he thought of that.  He had taken things for granted.  The war had come in his second year at the university,—­and he had gone to the front as a matter of course.

Failing fish prices, poor seasons, other minor disasters had followed,—­and always in the background, as old Donald saw it, the Gower influence, malign, vindictive, harboring that ancient grudge.

Whereas in the beginning MacRae had confidently expected by one resource and another to meet easily the obligation he had incurred, the end of it was the loss, during the second year of the war, of all the MacRae lands on Squitty,—­all but a rocky corner of a few acres which included the house and garden.  Old Donald had segregated that from his holdings when he pledged the land, as a matter of sentiment, not of value.  All the rest—­acres of pasture, cleared and grassed, stretches of fertile ground, blocks of noble timber still uncut—­had passed through the hands of mortgage holders, through bank transfers, by devious and tortuous ways, until the title rested in Horace Gower,—­who had promptly built the showy summer house on Cradle Bay to flaunt in his face, so old Donald believed and told his son.

It was a curious document, and it made a profound impression on Jack MacRae.  He passed over the underlying motive, a man justifying himself to his son for a failure which needed no justifying.  He saw now why his father tabooed all things Gower, why indeed he must have hated Gower as a man who does things in the open hates an enemy who strikes only from cover.