Gower was not doing that.  If he had done so, MacRae would have sneered at him with contempt.  As it was, in spite of the rancor he had nursed, the feeling which had driven him to reprisal, he found himself sorry—­sorry for himself, sorry for Betty.  He had set out to bludgeon Gower, to humiliate him, and the worst arrows he could sling had blunted their points against the man’s invulnerable spirit.

Betty had been used to luxury.  It had not spoiled her.  MacRae granted that.  It had not made her set great store by false values.  MacRae was sure of that.  She had loved him simply and naturally, with an almost primitive directness.  Spoiled daughters of the leisure class are not so simple and direct.  MacRae began to wonder if she could possibly escape resenting his share in the overturning of her father’s fortunes, whereby she herself must suffer.

By the time MacRae came slowly to these half-formed, disturbing conclusions he was already upon the verge of other disturbing discoveries in the realm of material facts.

For obvious reasons he could not walk up to Gower’s house and talk to Betty.  At least he did not see how he could, although there were times when he was tempted.  When he did see her he was acutely sensitive to a veiled reproach in her eyes, a courteous distance in her speech.  She came off the beach one day alone, a few minutes after MacRae dropped anchor in the usual spot.  She had a dozen salmon in the boat.  When she came alongside MacRae set foot over the bulwark with intent to load them himself.  She forestalled him by picking the salmon up and heaving them on the Blanco’s deck.  She was dressed for the work, in heavy nailed shoes, a flannel blouse, a rough tweed skirt.

“Oh, say, take the picaroon, won’t you?” He held it out to her, the six-foot wooden shaft with a slightly curving point of steel on the end.

She turned on him with a salmon dangling by the gills from her fingers.

“You don’t think I’m afraid to get my hands dirty, do you?” she asked.  “Me—­a fisherman’s daughter.  Besides, I’d probably miss the salmon and jab that pointed thing through the bottom of the boat.”

She laughed lightly, with no particular mirth in her voice.  And MacRae was stricken dumb.  She was angry.  He knew it, felt it intuitively.  Angry at him, warning him to keep his distance.  He watched her dabble her hands in the salt chuck, dry them coolly on a piece of burlap.  She took the money for the fish with a cool “thanks” and rowed back to shore.

Jack lay in his bunk that night blasted by a gloomy sense of futility in everything.  He had succeeded in his undertaking beyond all the expectations which had spurred him so feverishly in the beginning.  But there was no joy in it; not when Betty Gower looked at him with that cold gleam in her gray eyes.  Yet he told himself savagely that if he had to take his choice he would not have done otherwise.  And when he had accomplished the last move in his plan and driven Gower off the island, then he would have a chance to forget that such people had ever existed to fill a man’s days with unhappiness.  That, it seemed to him, must be the final disposition of this problem which his father and Horace Gower and Elizabeth Morton had set for him years before he was born.