ld have been broken like the
timbers of his sloop.

But his eyes did not linger there nor his thoughts upon shipwreck and
sudden death. His gaze turned across the Gulf to a tongue of land
outthrusting from the long purple reach of Vancouver Island. Behind that
point lay the Morton estate, and beside the Morton boundaries, matching
them mile for mile in wealth of virgin timber and fertile meadow, spread
the Gower lands.

His face, streaked and blotched with drying bloodstains, scarred with a
red gash that split his cheek from the hair above one ear to a corner of
his mouth, hardened into ugly lines. His eyes burned again.

This happened many years ago, long before a harassed world had to
reckon with bourgeois and Bolshevik, when profiteer and pacifist had not
yet become words to fill the mouths of men, and not even the politicians
had thought of saving the world for democracy. Yet men and women were
strangely as they are now. A generation may change its manners, its
outward seeming; it does not change in its loving and hating, in its
fundamental passions, its inherent reactions.

MacRae's face worked. His lips quivered as he stared across the troubled
sea. He lifted his hands in a swift gesture of appeal.

"O God," he cried, "curse and blast them in all their ways and
enterprises if they deal with her as they have dealt with me."

CHAPTER I

The House in Cradle Bay

On an afternoon in the first week of November, 1918, under a sky bank
full of murky cloud and an air freighted with a chill which threatened
untimely snow, a man came rowing up along the western side of Squitty
Island and turned into Cradle Bay, which lies under the lee of Point
Old. He was a young man, almost boyish-looking. He had on a pair of fine
tan shoes, brown overalls, a new gray mackinaw coat buttoned to his
chin. He was bareheaded. Also he wore a patch of pink celluloid over his
right eye.

When he turned into the small half-moon bight, he let up on his oars and
drifted, staring with a touch of surprise at a white cottage-roofed
house with wide porches sitting amid an acre square of bright green lawn
on a gentle slope that ran up from a narrow beach backed by a low
sea-wall of stone where the gravel ended and the earth began.

"Hm-m-m," he muttered. "It wasn't built yesterday, either. Funny he
never mentioned _that_."

He pushed on the oars and the boat slid nearer shore, the man's eyes
still steadfast on the house. It stood ou