, son and daughter, and
the delicate elderly woman with the faded rose-leaf face whom he had
seen only once. Whole passages of Donald MacRae's written life story
took form in living words. He could not disentangle himself from these
Gowers.

And he hated them!

Dark came down at last. MacRae went out on the porch. The few scattered
clouds had vanished completely. A starry sky glittered above horizons
edged by mountain ranges, serrated outlines astonishingly distinct. The
sea spread duskily mysterious from duskier shores. It was very still, to
MacRae suddenly very lonely, empty, depressing.

The knowledge that just across a narrow neck of land the Gowers,
father, daughter and son, went carelessly, securely about their own
affairs, made him infinitely more lonely, irritated him, stirred up a
burning resentment against the lot of them. He lumped them all together,
despite a curious tendency on the part of Betty's image to separate
itself from the others. He hated them, the whole damned, profiteering,
arrogant, butterfly lot. He nursed an unholy satisfaction in having made
some inroad upon their comfortable security, in having "sunk his
harpoon" into their only vulnerable spot.

But that satisfaction did not give him relief or content as he stood
looking out into the clear frost-tinged night. Squitty had all at once
become a ghostly place, haunted with sadness. Old Donald MacRae was
living over again in him, he had a feeling, reliving those last few
cheerless, hopeless years which, MacRae told himself savagely, Horace
Gower had deliberately made more cheerless and hopeless.

And he was in a fair way to love that man's flesh and blood? MacRae
sneered at himself in the dark. Never to the point of staying his hand,
of foregoing his purpose, of failing to strike a blow as chance offered.
Not so long as he was his father's son.

"Hang it, I'm getting morbid," MacRae muttered at last. "I've been
sticking around here too close. I'll pack a bag to-morrow and go to town
for a while."

He closed the door on the crisp, empty night, and set about getting
himself something to eat.

CHAPTER XIV

The Swing of the Pendulum

MacRae did himself rather well, as the English say, when he reached
Vancouver. This was a holiday, and he was disposed to make the most of
it. He put up at the Granada. He made a few calls and presently found
himself automatically relaunched upon Vancouver's social waters. There
were a few maids an