He
recalled him at their parting on a Vancouver railway platform,--tall and
rugged, a lean, muscular, middle-aged man, bidding his son a restrained
farewell with a longing look in his eyes. Now he was a wasted shadow.
Jack MacRae shivered. He seemed to hear the sable angel's wing-beats
over the house.

He looked up at the girl at last.

"You're worn out, aren't you, Dolly?" he said. "Have you been caring for
him alone?"

"Uncle Peter helped," she answered. "But I've stayed up and worried, and
I am tired, of course. It isn't a very cheerful home-coming, is it,
Jack? And he was so pleased when he got your cable from London. Poor old
man!"

MacRae got up suddenly. But the clatter of his shoes on the floor
recalled him to himself. He sat down again.

"I've got to do something," he asserted.

"There's nothing you can do," Dolly Ferrara said wistfully. "He can't
be moved. You can't get a doctor or a nurse. The country's full of
people down with the flu. There's only one chance and I've taken that. I
wrote a message to Doctor Laidlaw--you remember he used to come here
every summer to fish--and Uncle Peter went across to Sechelt to wire it.
I think he'll come if he can, or send some one, don't you? They were
such good friends."

"That was a good idea," MacRae nodded. "Laidlaw will certainly come if
it's possible."

"And I can keep cool cloths on his head and feed him broth and give him
the stuff Doctor Harper left. He said it depended mostly on his own
resisting power. If he could throw it off he would. If not--"

She turned her palms out expressively.

"How did you come?" she asked presently.

"Across from Qualicum in a fish carrier to Folly Bay. I borrowed a boat
at the Bay and rowed up."

"You must be hungry," she said. "I'll get you something to eat."

"I don't feel much like eating,"--MacRae followed her into the
kitchen--"but I can drink a cup of tea."

He sat on a corner of the kitchen table while she busied herself with
the kettle and teapot, marveling that in four years everything should
apparently remain the same and still suffer such grievous change. There
was an air of forlornness about the house which hurt him. The place had
run down, as the sands of his father's life were running down. Of the
things unchanged the girl he watched was one. Yet as he looked with
keener appraisal, he saw that Dolly Ferrara too had changed.

Her dusky cloud of hair was as of old; her wide, dark eyes still
mirrored