But MacRae would not follow that lead, whatever it might mean.  Betty Gower was nice,—­he had to admit it.  To glide around on a polished floor with his arm around her waist, her soft hand clasped in his, and her face close to his own, her grayish-blue eyes, which were so very like his own, now smiling and now soberly reflective, was not the way to carry on an inherited feud.  He couldn’t subject himself to that peculiarly feminine attraction which Betty Gower bore like an aura and nurse a grudge.  In fact, he had no grudge against Betty Gower except that she was the daughter of her father.  And he couldn’t explain to her that he hated her father because of injustice and injury done before either of them was born.  In the genial atmosphere of the Granada that sort of thing did not seem nearly so real, so vivid, as when he stood on the cliffs of Squitty listening to the pound of the surf.  Then it welled up in him like a flood,—­the resentment for all that Gower had made his father suffer, for those thirty years of reprisal which had culminated in reducing his patrimony to an old log house and a garden patch out of all that wide sweep of land along the southern face of Squitty.  He looked at Betty and wished silently that she were,—­well, Stubby Abbott’s sister.  He could be as nice as he wanted to then.  Whereupon, instinctively feeling himself upon dangerous ground, he diverged from the personal, talked without saying much until the music stopped and they found seats.  And when another partner claimed Betty, Jack as a matter of courtesy had to rejoin his own party.

The affair broke up at length.  MacRae slept late the next morning.  By the time he had dressed and breakfasted and taken a flying trip to Coal Harbor to look over a forty-five-foot fish carrier which was advertised for sale, he bethought himself of Stubby Abbott’s request and, getting on a car, rode out to the Abbott home.  This was a roomy stone house occupying a sightly corner in the West End,—­that sharply defined residential area of Vancouver which real estate agents unctuously speak of as “select.”  There was half a block of ground in green lawn bordered with rosebushes.  The house itself was solid, homely, built for use, and built to endure, all stone and heavy beams, wide windows and deep porches, and a red tile roof lifting above the gray stone walls.

Stubby permitted MacRae a few minutes’ exchange of pleasantries with his mother and sister.

“I want to extract some useful information from this man,” Stubby said at length.  “You can have at him later, Nell.  He’ll stay to dinner.”

“How do you know he will?” Nelly demanded.  “He hasn’t said so, yet.”

“Between you and me, he can’t escape,” Stubby said cheerfully and led Jack away upstairs into a small cheerful room lined with bookshelves, warmed by glowing coals in a grate, and with windows that gave a look down on a sandy beach facing the Gulf.

Stubby pushed two chairs up to the fire, waved Jack to one, and extended his own feet to the blaze.