ad puzzled her to the point of
anger, hurt her in a woman's most vital spot.

"I've been several kinds of a fool," MacRae said to himself. "I have
been fooling myself."

He had said to himself once, in a somber mood, that life was nothing but
a damned dirty scramble in which a man could be sure of getting hurt.
But it struck him now that he had been sedulously inflicting those hurts
upon himself. Nature cannot be flouted. She exacts terrible penalties
for the stifling, the inhibition, the deflection of normal instincts,
fundamental impulses. He perceived the operation of this in his father's
life, in the thirty years of petty conflict between Horace Gower and his
wife. And he had unconsciously been putting himself and Betty in the way
of similar penalties by exalting revenge for old, partly imagined wrongs
above that strange magnetic something which drew them together.

Twilight was at hand. Looking through the maple and alder fringe before
his house MacRae saw the fishing boats coming one after the other,
clustering about the _Blanco_. He went down and slid the old green
dugout afloat and so gained the deck of his vessel. For an hour
thereafter he worked steadily until all the salmon were delivered and
stowed in the _Blanco's_ chilly hold.

He found it hard to keep his mind on the count of salmon, on money to be
paid each man, upon these common details of his business. His thought
reached out in wide circles, embracing many things, many persons:
Norman Gower and Dolly, who had had courage to put the past behind them
and reach for happiness together; Stubby Abbott and Etta Robbin-Steele,
who were being flung together by the same inscrutable forces within
them. Love might not truly make the world go round, but it was a
tremendous motive power in human actions. Like other dynamic forces it
had its dangerous phases. Love, as MacRae had experienced it, was a
curious mixture of affection and desire, of flaming passion and infinite
tenderness. Betty Gower warmed him like a living flame when he let her
take possession of his thought. She was all that his fancy could conjure
as desirable. She was his mate. He had felt that, at times, with a
conviction beyond reason or logic ever since the night he kissed her in
the Granada. If fate, or the circumstances he had let involve him,
should juggle them apart, he felt that the years would lead him down
long, drab corridors.

And he was suddenly determined that should not happen. H