a certain man and woman together in spite of themselves, in
spite of things they can see in each other that they don't quite like, I
dare say you'd understand. I don't think I do. Norman Gower has made me
dreadfully unhappy. But I loved him before he went away, and I love him
yet. I want him just the same. And he says--he says--that he never
stopped caring for me--that it was like a bad dream. I believe him. I'm
sure of it. He didn't lie to me. And I can't hate him. I can't punish
him without punishing myself. I don't want to punish him, any more than
I would want to punish a baby, if I had one, for a naughtiness it
couldn't help."

"So you'll marry him eventually?" MacRae asked.

Dolly nodded.

"If he doesn't change his mind," she murmured. "Oh, I shouldn't say ugly
things like that. It sounds cheap and mean."

"But it hurts, it hurts me so to think of it," she broke out
passionately. "I can forgive him, because I can see how it happened.
Still it hurts. I feel cheated--cheated!"

She lay back in her chair, fingers locked together, red lips parted over
white teeth that were clenched together. Her eyes glowed somberly,
looking away through distant spaces.

And MacRae, conscious that she had said her say, feeling that she wanted
to be alone, as he himself always wanted to fight a grief or a hurt
alone and in silence, walked out into the sunshine, where the westerly
droned high above in the swaying fir tops.

He went up the path around the Cove's head to the porch of his own
house, sat down on the top step, and cursed the Gowers, root and branch.
He hated them, everything of the name and blood, at that moment, with a
profound and active hatred.

They were like a blight, as their lives touched the lives of other
people. They sat in the seats of the mighty, and for their pleasure or
their whims others must sweat and suffer. So it seemed to Jack MacRae.

Home, these crowded, hurrying days, was aboard the _Blackbird_. It was
pleasant now to sit on his own doorstep and smell the delicate perfume
of the roses and the balsamy odors from the woods behind. But the rooms
depressed him when he went in. They were dusty and silent, abandoned to
that forsaken air which rests upon uninhabited dwellings. MacRae went
out again, to stride aimlessly along the cliffs past the mouth of the
Cove.

Beyond the lee of the island the westerly still lashed the Gulf. The
white horses galloped on a gray-green field. MacRae found a grassy