“I won’t.  I’d see them all in Hades first,” Norman growled.  “I’ll admit it stings me to have people think so and rub it in, in their polite way.  But I’m getting more or less indifferent.  There are plenty of real people in England who know I did the only work I could do and did it well.  Do you imagine I fancied sitting on the side lines when all the fellows I knew were playing a tough game?  But I can’t go about telling that to people at home.  I’ll be damned if I will.  A man has to learn to stand the gaff sometime, and the last year or so seems to be my period of schooling.”

“Why tell all this to me?” MacRae asked quietly.

Norman rose from the log.  He chucked the butt of his cigarette away.  He looked directly, rather searchingly, at MacRae.

“Really, I don’t know,” he said in a flat, expressionless.  Then he walked on.

MacRae watched him pass out of sight among the thickets.  Young Gower had succeeded in dispelling the passive contentment of basking in the sun.  He had managed to start buzzing trains of not too agreeable reflection.  MacRae got to his feet before long and tramped back around the Cove’s head.  He had known, of course, that the Gowers still made more or less use of their summer cottage.  But he had not come in personal contact with any of them since the night Betty had given him that new, disturbing angle from which to view her.  He had avoided her purposely.  Now he was afflicted with a sudden restlessness, a desire for other voices and faces besides his own, and so, as he was in the habit of doing when such a mood seized him, he went on to Peter Ferrara’s house.

He walked in through a wide-open door, unannounced by aught save his footsteps, as he was accustomed to do, and he found Dolly Ferrara and Betty Gower laughing and chatting familiarly in the kitchen over teacups and little cakes.

“Oh, I beg pardon,” said he.  “I didn’t know you were entertaining.”

“I don’t entertain, and you know it,” Dolly laughed.  “Come down from that lofty altitude and I’ll give you a cup of tea.”

“Mr. MacRae, being an aviator of some note,” Betty put in, “probably finds himself at home in the high altitudes.”

“Do I seem to be up in the air?” MacRae inquired dryly.  “I shall try to come down behind my own lines, and not in enemy territory.”

“You might have to make a forced landing,” Dolly remarked.

Her great dusky eyes rested upon him with a singular quality of speculation.  MacRae wondered if those two had been talking about him, and why.

There was an astonishing contrast between these two girls, MacRae thought, his mind and his eyes busy upon them while his tongue uttered idle words and his hands coped with a teacup and cakes.  They were the product of totally dissimilar environments.  They were the physical antithesis of each other,—­in all but the peculiar feline grace of young females who are healthily, exuberantly alive.  Yet MacRae had a feeling that they were sisters under their skins, wonderfully alike in their primary emotions.  Why, then, he wondered, should one be capable of moving him to violent emotional reactions (he had got that far in his self-admissions concerning Betty Gower), and the other move him only to a friendly concern and latterly a certain pity?