“She was cowardly too.  Do you think two old men and myself would have taken her, or anything else, from your father out in the middle of the Gulf, if she had had any spirit?  You knew your father.  He wasn’t a tame man.  He would have fought—­fought like a tiger.  We might have killed him.  It is more likely that he would have killed us.  But we could not have beaten him.  But she had to knuckle down—­take the easy way for her.  She cried; and he promised.”

Gower lay back in his chair.  His chin sunk on his breast.  He spoke slowly, groping for his words.  MacRae did not interrupt.  Something compelled him to listen.  There was a pained ring in Gower’s voice that held him.  The man was telling him these things with visible reluctance, with a simple dignity that arrested him, even while he felt that he should not listen.

“She used to taunt me with that,” he went on, “taunt me with striking Donald MacRae.  For years after we were married she used to do that.  Long after—­and that wasn’t so long—­she had ceased to care if such a man as your father existed.  That was only an episode to her, of which she was snobbishly ashamed in time.  But she often reminded me that I had struck him like a hardened butcher, because she knew she could hurt me with that.  So that I used to wish to God I had never followed her out into the Gulf.

“For thirty years I’ve lived and worked and never known any real satisfaction in living—­or happiness.  I’ve played the game, played it hard.  I’ve been hard, they say.  Probably I have.  I didn’t care.  A man had to walk on others or be walked on himself.  I made money.  Money—­I poured it into her hands, like pouring sand in a rat-hole.  She lived for herself, her whims, her codfish-aristocracy standards, spending my money like water to make a showing, giving me nothing in return, nothing but whining and recrimination if I crossed her ever so little.  She made a lap dog of her son the first twenty-five years of his life.  She would have made Betty a cheap imitation of herself.  But she couldn’t do that.”

He stopped a moment and shook his head gently.

“No,” he resumed, “she couldn’t do that.  There’s iron in that girl.  She’s all Gower.  I think I should have thrown up my hands long ago only for Betty’s sake.”

MacRae shifted uneasily.

“You see,” Gower continued, “my life has been a failure, too.  When Donald MacRae and I clashed, I prevailed.  I got what I wanted.  But it was only a shadow.  There was no substance.  It didn’t do me any good.  I have made money, barrels of it, and that has not done me any good.  I’ve been successful at everything I undertook—­except lately—­but succeeding as the world reckons success hasn’t made me happy.  In my personal life I’ve been a damned failure.  I’ve always been aware of that.  And if I have held a feeling toward Donald MacRae these thirty-odd years, it was a feeling of envy.  I would have traded places with him and been the gainer.  I would