e replied frankly; "perhaps the sting of what you said lay in
its being partly true. A half truth is sometimes a deadly weapon. I
wonder if you do really hate us as much, as your manner implied--and
why?"

"Us. Who?" MacRae asked.

"My father and me," she put it bluntly.

"What makes you think I do?" MacRae asked. "Because I have set up a
fierce competition in a business where your father has had a monopoly so
long that he thinks this part of the Gulf belongs to him? Because I
resent your running down one of my boats? Because I go about my affairs
in my own way, regardless of Gower interests?"

"What do these things amount to?" Betty answered impatiently. "It's in
your manner, your attitude. Sometimes it even shows in your eyes. It
was there the morning I came across you sitting on Point Old, the day
after the armistice was signed. I've danced with you and seen you look
at me as if--as if," she laughed self-consciously, "you would like to
wring my neck. I have never done anything to create a dislike of that
sort. I have never been with you without being conscious that you were
repressing something, out of--well, courtesy, I suppose. There is a
peculiar tension about you whenever my father is mentioned. I'm not a
fool," she finished, "even if I happen to be one of what you might call
the idle rich. What is the cause of this bad blood?"

"What does it matter?" MacRae parried.

"There is something, then?" she persisted.

MacRae turned his head away. He couldn't tell her. It was not wholly his
story to tell. How could he expect her to see it, to react to it as he
did? A matter involving her father and mother, and his father. It was
not a pretty tale. He might be influenced powerfully in a certain
direction by the account of it passed on by old Donald MacRae; he might
be stirred by the backwash of those old passions, but he could not lay
bare all that to any one--least of all to Betty Gower. And still MacRae,
for the moment, was torn between two desires. He retained the same
implacable resentment toward Gower, and he found himself wishing to set
Gower's daughter apart and outside the consequences of that ancient
feud. And that, he knew, was trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. It
couldn't be done.

"Was the _Arrow_ holed in the crash?"

Betty stood staring at him. She blinked. Her fingers began again that
nervous plucking at the blanket. But her face settled presently into
its normal composure and she answered