He was not even conscious of trespassing on Horace Gower’s land.  When he thought of it, of course he realized that this was legally so.  But the legal fact had no reality for MacRae.  Between the Cove and Point Old, for a mile back into the dusky woods, he felt free to come and go as he chose.  He had always believed and understood and felt that area to be his, and he still held to that old impression.  There was not a foot of that six hundred acres that he had not explored alone, with his father, with Dolly Ferrara, season after season.  He had gone barefoot over the rocks, dug clams on the beaches, fished trout in the little streams, hunted deer and grouse in the thickets, as far back as he could remember.  He had loved the cliffs and the sea, the woods around the Cove with an affection bred in use and occupancy, confirmed by the sense of inviolate possession.  Old things are dear, if a man has once loved them.  They remain so.  The aura of beloved familiarity clings to them long after they have passed into alien hands.  When MacRae thought of this and turned his eyes upon this noble sweep of land and forest which his father had claimed for his own from the wilderness, it was as if some one had deprived him of an eye or an arm by trickery and unfair advantage.

He was not glooming over such things this rare morning which had come like a benediction after ten days of rain and wind.  He was sitting on his log bareheaded, filled with a passive content rare in his recent experience.

From this perch, in the idle wandering of his gaze, his eyes at length rested upon Peter Ferrara’s house.  He saw a man and a woman come out of the front door and stand for a minute or two on the steps.  He could not recognize the man at the distance, but he could guess.  The man presently walked away around the end of the Cove, MacRae perceived that his guess was correct, for Norman Gower came out on the brow of the cliff that bordered the south side of the Cove.  He appeared a short distance away, walking slowly, his eyes on the Cove and Peter Ferrara’s house.  He did not see MacRae till he was quite close and glanced that way.

“Hello, MacRae,” he said.

“How d’ do,” Jack answered.  There was no cordiality in his tone.  If he had any desire at that moment it was not for speech with Norman Gower, but rather a desire that Gower should walk on.

But the other man sat down on MacRae’s log.

“Not much like over the pond, this,” he remarked.

“Not much,” MacRae agreed indifferently.

Young Gower took a cigarette case out of his pocket, extended it to MacRae, who declined with a brief shake of his head.  Norman lighted a cigarette.  He was short and stoutly built, a compact, muscular man somewhat older than MacRae.  He had very fair hair and blue eyes, and the rose-leaf skin of his mother had in him taken on a masculine floridity.  But he had the Gower mouth and determined chin.  So had Betty, MacRae was reminded, looking at her brother.