of the city,
damning with silent oaths the coil in which he found himself
inextricably involved. History was repeating itself. Like father, like
son.

There was a difference though. MacRae, as he grew calmer, marked that.
Old Donald had lost his sweetheart by force and trickery. His son must
forego love--if it were indeed love--of his own volition. He had no
choice. He saw no way of winning Betty Gower unless he stayed his hand
against her father. And he would not do that. He could not. It would be
like going over to the enemy in the heat of battle. Gower had wronged
and persecuted his father. He had beaten old Donald without mercy in
every phase of that thirty-year period. He had taken Donald MacRae's
woman from him in the beginning and his property in the end. Jack MacRae
had every reason to believe Gower merely sat back awaiting a favorable
opportunity to crush him.

So there could be no compromising there; no inter-marrying and
sentimental burying of the old feud. Betty would tie his hands. He was
afraid of her power to do that. He did not want to be a Samson shorn.
His ego revolted against love interfering with the grim business of
everyday life. He bit his lip and wished he could wipe out that kiss. He
cursed himself for a slavish weakness of the flesh. The night was old
when MacRae lay down on his bed. But he could find no ease for the
throbbing ferment within him. He suffered with a pain as keen as if he
had been physically wounded, and the very fact that he could so suffer
filled him with dismay. He had faced death many times with less emotion
than he now was facing life.

He had no experience of love. Nothing remotely connected with women had
ever suggested such possibilities of torment. He had known first-hand
the pangs of hunger and thirst, of cold and weariness, of anger and
hate, of burning wounds in his flesh. He had always been able to grit
his teeth and endure; none of it had been able to wring his soul. This
did. He had come to manhood, to a full understanding of sex, at a time
when he played the greatest game of all, when all his energies were
fiercely centered upon preservation for himself and certain destruction
for other men. Perhaps because he had come back clean, having never
wasted himself in complaisant liaisons overseas, the inevitable focusing
of passion stirred him more profoundly. He was neither a varietist nor a
male prude. He was aware of sex. He knew desire. But the flame Betty
Gowe