She shot this question at him with a swift change of tone and an earnestness which straightway drove out of MacRae’s mind every consideration save the proper and convincing answer to such intimate questions.

“Look,” Betty said after a long interval.  “Daddy has built a fire on the beach.  He does that sometimes, and we sit around it and roast clams in the coals.  Johnny, Johnny,” she squeezed his arm with a quick pressure, “we’re going to have some good times on this island now.”

MacRae laughed indulgently.  He was completely in accord with that prophecy.

The blaze Gower had kindled flickered and wavered, a red spot on the duskier shore, with a yellow nimbus in which they saw him move here and there, and sit down at last with his back to a log and his feet stretched to the fire.

“Let’s go down,” MacRae suggested, “and break the news to him.”

“I wonder what he’ll say?” Betty murmured thoughtfully.

“Haven’t you any idea?” MacRae asked curiously.

“No.  Honestly, I haven’t,” Betty replied.  “Daddy’s something like you, Jack.  That is, he does and says unexpected things, now and then.  No, I really don’t know what he will say.”

“We’ll soon find out.”

MacRae took her hand.  They went down off the backbone of the Point, through ferns and over the long uncut grass, down to the fire where the wash from the heavy swell outside made watery murmurs along the gravelly beach.

Gower looked up at them, waited for them to speak.

“Betty and I are going to be married soon,” MacRae announced abruptly.

“Oh?” Gower took the pipe out of his mouth and rapped the ash out of it in the palm of his hand.  “You don’t do things half-heartedly, do you, MacRae?  You deprive me of a very profitable business.  You want my ranch—­and now my housekeeper.”

“Daddy!” Betty remonstrated.

“Oh, well, I suppose I can learn to cook for myself,” Gower rumbled.

He was frowning.  He looked at them staring at him, nonplussed.  Suddenly he burst into deep, chuckling laughter.

“Sit down, sit down, and look at the fire,” he said.  “Bless your soul, if you want to get married that’s your own business.

“Mind you,” he chuckled after a minute, when Betty had snuggled down beside him, and MacRae perched on the log by her, “I don’t say I like the idea.  It don’t seem fair for a man to raise a daughter and then have some young fellow sail up and take her away just when she is beginning to make herself useful.”

“Daddy, you certainly do talk awful nonsense,” Betty reproved.

“I expect you haven’t talked much else the last little while,” he retorted.

Betty subsided.  MacRae smiled.  There was a whimsicality about Gower’s way of taking this that pleased MacRae.

They toasted their feet at the fire until the wavering flame burned down to a bed of glowing coals.  They talked of this and that, of everything but themselves until the moon was swimming high and the patches of cottony cloud sailing across the moon’s face cast intense black patches on the silvery radiance of the sea.