MacRae made no attempt to free his hand.  He was quite satisfied to let it be.  The touch of her warm flesh against his stirred him a little, sent his mind straying off into strange channels.  Queer that the first woman to care for him when he crept wounded and shaken to the shelter of his own roof should be the daughter of his enemy.  For MacRae could not otherwise regard Horace Gower.  Anything short of that seemed treason to the gray old man who had died in the next room, babbling of his son and the west wind and some one he called Bessie.

MacRae’s eyes blurred unexpectedly.  What a damned shame things had to be the way they were.  Behind this girl, who was in herself lovely and desirable as a woman should be, loomed the pudgy figure of her father, ruthless, vindictively unjust.  Gower hadn’t struck at him openly; but that, MacRae believed, was merely for lack of suitable opening.

But that did not keep Jack MacRae from thinking—­what every normal man begins to think, or rather to feel, soon or late—­that he is incomplete, insufficient, without some particular woman to love him, upon whom to bestow love.  It was like a revelation.  He caught himself wishing that Betty would wake up and smile at him, bend over him with a kiss.  He stared up at the shadowy roof beams, feeling the hot blood leap to his face at the thought.  There was an uncanny magic in the nearness of her, a lure in the droop of her tired body.  And MacRae struggled against that seduction.  Yet he could not deny that Betty Gower, innocently sleeping with his hand fast in hers, filled him with visions and desires which had never before focused with such intensity on any woman who had come his way.  Mysteriously she seemed absolved of all blame for being a Gower, for any of the things the Gower clan had done to him and his, even to the misfortune of that night which had cost a man his life.

“It isn’t her fault,” MacRae said to himself.  “But, Lord, I wish she’d kept away from here, if this sort of thing is going to get me.”

What this was he did not attempt to define.  He did not admit that he was hovering on the brink of loving Betty Gower—­it seemed an incredible thing for him to do—­but was vividly aware that she had kindled an incomprehensible fire in him, and he suspected, indeed he feared with a fear that bordered on spiritual shrinking, that it would go on glowing after she was gone.  And she would go presently.  This spontaneous rushing to his aid was merely what a girl like that, with generous impulses and quick sympathy, would do for any one in dire need.  She would leave behind her an inescapable longing, an emptiness, a memory of sweetly disturbing visions.  MacRae seemed to see with remarkable clarity and sureness that he would be penalized for yielding to that bewitching fancy.  By what magic had she so suddenly made herself a shining figure in a golden dream?  Some necromancy of the spirit, invisible but wonderfully