But she was proud.  He knew that he had puzzled her to the point of anger, hurt her in a woman’s most vital spot.

“I’ve been several kinds of a fool,” MacRae said to himself.  “I have been fooling myself.”

He had said to himself once, in a somber mood, that life was nothing but a damned dirty scramble in which a man could be sure of getting hurt.  But it struck him now that he had been sedulously inflicting those hurts upon himself.  Nature cannot be flouted.  She exacts terrible penalties for the stifling, the inhibition, the deflection of normal instincts, fundamental impulses.  He perceived the operation of this in his father’s life, in the thirty years of petty conflict between Horace Gower and his wife.  And he had unconsciously been putting himself and Betty in the way of similar penalties by exalting revenge for old, partly imagined wrongs above that strange magnetic something which drew them together.

Twilight was at hand.  Looking through the maple and alder fringe before his house MacRae saw the fishing boats coming one after the other, clustering about the Blanco.  He went down and slid the old green dugout afloat and so gained the deck of his vessel.  For an hour thereafter he worked steadily until all the salmon were delivered and stowed in the Blanco’s chilly hold.

He found it hard to keep his mind on the count of salmon, on money to be paid each man, upon these common details of his business.  His thought reached out in wide circles, embracing many things, many persons:  Norman Gower and Dolly, who had had courage to put the past behind them and reach for happiness together; Stubby Abbott and Etta Robbin-Steele, who were being flung together by the same inscrutable forces within them.  Love might not truly make the world go round, but it was a tremendous motive power in human actions.  Like other dynamic forces it had its dangerous phases.  Love, as MacRae had experienced it, was a curious mixture of affection and desire, of flaming passion and infinite tenderness.  Betty Gower warmed him like a living flame when he let her take possession of his thought.  She was all that his fancy could conjure as desirable.  She was his mate.  He had felt that, at times, with a conviction beyond reason or logic ever since the night he kissed her in the Granada.  If fate, or the circumstances he had let involve him, should juggle them apart, he felt that the years would lead him down long, drab corridors.

And he was suddenly determined that should not happen.  His imagination flung before him kinetoscopic flashes of what his father’s life had been and Horace Gower’s.  That vision appalled MacRae.  He would not let it happen,—­not to him and Betty.

He washed, ate his supper, lay on his bunk in the pilot house and smoked a cigarette.  Then he went out on deck.  The moon crept up in a cloudless sky, dimming the stars.  There was no wind about the island.  But there was wind loose somewhere on the Gulf.  The glass was falling.  The swells broke more heavily along the cliffs.  At the mouth of the Cove white sheets of spray lifted as each comber reared and broke in that narrow place.