Certainly either one would quite justify a man in seeking her for his mate, if he found his natural instincts urging him along ways which MacRae was beginning to perceive no normal man could escape traveling.  And if he had to tread that road, why should it not have been his desire to tread it with Dolly Ferrara?  That would have been so much simpler.  With unconscious egotism he put aside Norman Gower as a factor.  If he had to develop an unaccountable craving for some particular woman, why couldn’t it have centered upon a woman he knew as well as he knew Dolly, whose likes and dislikes, little tricks of speech and manner, habits of thought, all the inconsiderable traits that go to make up what we call personality, were pleasantly familiar?

Strange thoughts over a teacup, MacRae decided.  It seemed even more strange that he should be considering such intimately personal things in the very act of carrying on an impersonal triangular conversation; as if there were two of him present, one being occupied in the approved teacup manner while the other sat by speculating with a touch of moroseness upon distressingly important potentialities.  This duality persisted in functioning even when Betty looked at her watch and said, “I must go.”

He walked with her around to the head of the Cove.  He had not wanted to do that,—­and still he did.  He found himself filled with an intense and resentful curiosity about this calm, self-possessed young woman.  He wondered if she really had any power to hurt him, if there resided in her any more potent charm than other women possessed, or if it were a mere sentimental befogging of his mind due to the physical propinquity of her at a time when he was weak and bruised and helpless.  He could feel the soft warmth of her hands yet, and without even closing his eyes he could see her reddish-brown hair against the white of his bed covers and the tired droop of her body as she slept that night.

Curiously enough, before they were well clear of the Ferrara house they had crossed swords.  Courteously, to be sure.  MacRae could not afterward recall clearly how it began,—­something about the war and the after-effect of the war.  British Columbia nowise escaped the muddle into which the close of the war and the wrangle of the peacemakers had plunged both industry and politics.  There had been a recent labor disturbance in Vancouver in which demobilized soldiers had played a part.

“You can’t blame these men much.  They’re bewildered at some of the things they get up against, and exasperated by others.  A lot of them have found the going harder at home than it was in France.  A lot of promises and preachments don’t fit in with performance since the guns have stopped talking.  I suppose that doesn’t seem reasonable to people like you,” MacRae found himself saying.  “You don’t have to gouge and claw a living out of the world.  Or at least, if there is any gouging and clawing to be done, you are not personally involved in it.  You get it done by proxy.”