He talked with Hurley,—­the same gentleman whom he had once approached with no success in the matter of selling salmon.  The situation was reversed now.  The Northwest was eager to buy.  They would pay him, sub rosa, two cents a pound over the market price for fresh salmon if he would supply them with the largest possible quantity from the beginning of the blueback run.

As with Robbin-Steele, MacRae refused to commit himself.  More clearly he perceived that the scramble was beginning.  The packers and the cold-storage companies had lost control.  They must have fish to function, to make a profit.  They would cut one another’s throats for salmon.  So much the better, MacRae cynically reflected.  He told Hurley, at last, as he had told Robbin-Steele, to wait till the salmon began to run.

He left the Northwest offices with the firm conviction that it was not going to be a question of markets, but a question of getting the salmon.  And he rather fancied he could do that.

Last of all on the list of these men who approached him in this fashion came Stubby Abbott.  Stubby did not ask him to call.  He came to the Granada in search of Jack and haled him, nothing loth, out to the stone house in the West End.  It happened that Betty Gower, Etta Robbin-Steele, and two gilded youths, whom MacRae did not know, were there.  They had been walking in the Park.  Nelly and her mother were serving tea.

It happened, too, that as they chatted over the teacups, a blue-bodied limousine drew up under the Abbott pergola and deposited Mrs. Horace A. Gower for a brief conversation with Mrs. Abbott.  It was MacRae’s first really close contact with the slender, wonderfully preserved lady whose life had touched his father’s so closely in the misty long ago.  He regarded her with a reflective interest.  She must have been very beautiful then, he thought.  She was almost beautiful still.  Certainly she was a very distinguished person, with her costly clothing, her rich furs, her white hair, and that faded rose-leaf skin.  The petulant, querulous droop of her mouth escaped MacRae.  He was not a physiognomist.  But the distance of her manner did not escape him.  She acknowledged the introduction and thereafter politely overlooked MacRae.  He meant nothing at all to Mrs. Horace A. Gower, he saw very clearly.  Merely a young man among other young men; a young man of no particular interest.  Thirty years is a long time, MacRae reflected.  But his father had not forgotten.  He wondered if she had; if those far-off hot-blooded days had grown dim and unreal to her?

He turned his head once and caught Betty as intent upon him as he was upon her mother, under cover of the general conversation.  He gathered that there was a shade of reproach, of resentment, in her eyes.  But he could not be sure.  Certainly there was nothing like that in her manner.  But the manner of these people, he understood very well, was pretty much a mask.  Whatever went on in their secret bosoms, they smiled and joked and were unfailingly courteous.