“You sank your harpoon pretty deep into Folly Bay this season,” Norman said abruptly.  “Did you do pretty well yourself?”

“Pretty well,” MacRae drawled.  “Did it worry you?”

“Me?  Hardly,” young Gower smiled.  “It did not cost me anything to operate Folly Bay at a loss while I was in charge.  I had neither money nor reputation to lose.  You may have worried the governor.  I dare say you did.  He never did take kindly to anything or any one that interfered with his projects.  But I haven’t heard him commit himself.  He doesn’t confide in me, anyway, nor esteem me very highly in any capacity.  I wonder if your father ever felt that way about you?”

“No,” MacRae said impulsively.  “By God, no!”

“Lucky.  And you came home with a record behind you.  Nothing to handicap you.  You jumped into the fray to do something for yourself and made good right off the bat.  There is such a thing as luck,” Norman said soberly.  “A man can do his best—­and fail.  I have, so far.  I was expected to come home a credit to the family, a hero, dangling medals on my manly chest.  Instead, I’ve lost caste with my own crowd.  Girls and fellows I used to know sneer at me behind my back.  They put their tongues in their cheek and say I was a crafty slacker.  I suppose you’ve heard the talk?”

“No,” MacRae answered shortly; he had forgotten Nelly Abbott’s questioning almost the first time he met her.  “I don’t run much with your crowd, anyway.”

“Well, they can think what they damn please,” young Gower grumbled.  “It’s quite true that I was never any closer to the front than the Dover cliffs.  Perhaps at home here in the beginning they handed me a captain’s commission on the family pull.  But I tried to deliver the goods.  These people think I dodged the trenches.  They don’t know my eyesight spoiled my chances of going into action.  I couldn’t get to France.  So I did my bit where headquarters told me I could do it or go home.  And all I have got out of it is the veiled contempt of nearly everybody I know, my father included, for not killing Germans with my own hands.”

MacRae kept still.  It was a curious statement.  Young Gower twisted and ground his boot heel into the soft earth.

“Being a rich man’s son has proved a considerable handicap in my case,” he continued at last.  “I was petted and coddled all my life.  Then the war came along.  Everybody expected a lot of me.  And I am as good as excommunicated for not coming up to expectations.  Beautiful irony.  If my eyes had been normal, I should be another of Vancouver’s heroes,—­alive or dead.  The spirit doesn’t seem to count.  The only thing that matters, evidently, is that I stayed on the safe side of the Channel.  They take it for granted that I did so because I valued my own skin above everything.  Idiots.”

“You can easily explain,” MacRae suggested.