“How?” MacRae asked.

“Funked it over across,” Stubby replied.  “So they say.  Careful to stay on the right side of the Channel.  Paying the penalty now.  Girls rather rub it in.  Fellows not too—­well, cordial.  Pretty rotten for Norman.”

“Think he slacked deliberately?” MacRae inquired.

“That’s the story.  Lord, I don’t know,” Stubby answered.  “He stuck in England four years.  Everybody else that was fit went up the line.  That’s all I know.  By their deeds ye shall judge them—­eh?”

“Perhaps.  What does he say about that himself?”

“Nothing, so far as I know.  Keeps strictly mum on the war subject,” Stubby said.

Young Gower did not alter his position during the few minutes they sat there.  He sat staring straight ahead of him, unseeingly.  MacRae suddenly felt sorry for him.  If he had told the truth he was suffering a peculiarly distressing form of injustice, of misconception.  MacRae recalled the passionate undertone in Gower’s voice when he said, “I did the only thing I could do in the way I was told to do it.”  Yes, he was sorry for Norman.  The poor devil was not getting a square deal.

But MacRae’s pity was swiftly blotted out.  He had a sudden uncomfortable vision of old Donald MacRae rowing around Poor Man’s Rock, back and forth in sun and rain, in frosty dawns and stormy twilights, coming home to a lonely house, dying at last a lonely death, the sordid culmination of an embittered life.

Let him sweat,—­the whole Gower tribe.  MacRae was the ancient Roman, for the moment, wishing all his enemies had but a single head that he might draw his sword and strike it off.  Something in him hardened against that first generous impulse to repeat to Stubby Abbott what Norman had told him on the cliff at Squitty.  Let the beggar make his own defense.  Yet that stubborn silence, the proud refusal to make words take the place of valiant deeds expected, wrung a gleam of reluctant admiration from MacRae.  He would have done just that himself.

“Let’s get back,” Stubby suggested.  “I’ve got the next dance with Betty Gower.  I don’t want to miss it.”

“Is she here to-night?  I haven’t noticed her.”

“Eyesight affected?” Stubby bantered.  “Sure she’s here.  Looking like a dream.”

MacRae felt a pang of envy.  There was nothing to hold Stubby back,—­no old scores, no deep, abiding resentment.  MacRae had the conviction that Stubby would never take anything like that so seriously as he, Jack MacRae, did.  He was aware that Stubby had the curious dual code common in the business world,—­one set of inhibitions and principles for business and another for personal and social uses.  A man might be Stubby’s opponent in the market and his friend when they met on a common social ground.  MacRae could never be quite like that.  Stubby could fight Horace Gower, for instance, tooth and toenail, for an advantage in the salmon trade, and stretch his legs under Gower’s dining table with no sense of incongruity, no matter what shifts the competitive struggle had taken or what weapons either had used.  That was business; and a man left his business at the office.  A curious thing, MacRae thought.  A phenomenon in ethics which he found hard to understand, harder still to endorse.