He sat on a log at the brink of the Cove one morning, in a burst of sunshine as grateful as it was rare.  He looked out at the mainland shore, shading away from deep olive to a faint and misty blue.  He cast his gaze along Vancouver Island, a three-hundred-mile barrier against the long roll of the Pacific.  He thought of England, with its scant area and its forty million souls.  He smiled.  An empire opened within range of his vision.  He had had to go to Europe to appreciate his own country.  Old, old peoples over there.  Outworn, bewildered aristocracies and vast populations troubled with the specter of want, swarming like rabbits, pressing always close upon the means of subsistence.  No room; no chance.  Born in social stratas solidified by centuries.  No wonder Europe was full of race and class hatred, of war and pestilence.  Snap judgment,—­but Jack MacRae had seen the peasants of France and Belgium, the driven workmen of industrial France and England.  He had seen also something of the forces which controlled them, caught glimpses of the iron hand in the velvet glove, a hand that was not so sure and steady as in days gone by.

Here a man still had a chance.  He could not pick golden apples off the fir trees.  He must use his brains as well as his hands.  A reasonable measure of security was within a man’s grasp if he tried for it.  To pile up a fortune might be a heavy task.  But getting a living was no insoluble problem.  A man could accomplish either without selling his soul or cutting throats or making serfs of his fellow men.  There was room to move and breathe,—­and some to spare.

Perhaps Jack MacRae, in view of his feelings, his cherished projects, was a trifle inconsistent in the judgments he passed, sitting there on his log in the winter sunshine.  But the wholly consistent must die young.  Their works do not appear in this day and hour.  The normal man adjusts himself to, and his actions are guided by, moods and circumstances which are seldom orderly and logical in their sequence.

MacRae cherished as profound an animosity toward Horace Gower as any Russian ever felt for bureaucratic tyranny.  He could smart under injustice and plan reprisal.  He could appreciate his environment, his opportunities, be glad that his lines were cast amid rugged beauty.  But he did not on that account feel tolerant toward those whom he conceived to be his enemies.  He was not, however, thinking concretely of his personal affairs or tendencies that bright morning.  He was merely sitting more or less quiescent on his log, nursing vagrant impressions, letting the sun bathe him.