ws of dancing couples flitted by the windows. MacRae
looked once and went on, moody because chance had decreed that he should
fail.

* * * * *

When a ruddy dawn broke through the gray cloud battalions Jack MacRae
sat on a chair before the fireplace in the front room, his elbows on his
knees, his chin in his cupped palms. He had been sitting like that for
two hours. The fir logs had wasted away to a pile of white ash spotted
with dying coals. MacRae sat heedless that the room was growing cold.

He did not even lift his head at the sound of heavy footsteps on the
porch. He did not move until a voice at the door spoke his name in
accents of surprise.

"Is that you, yourself, Johnny MacRae?"

The voice was deep and husky and kind, and it was not native to Squitty
Cove. MacRae lifted his head to see his father's friend and his own,
Doctor Laidlaw, physician and fisherman, bulking large. And beyond the
doctor he saw a big white launch at anchor inside the Cove.

"Yes," MacRae said.

"How's your father?" Laidlaw asked. "That wire worried me. I made the
best time I could."

"He's dead," MacRae answered evenly. "He died at midnight."

CHAPTER IV

Inheritance

On a morning four days later Jack MacRae sat staring into the coals on
the hearth. It was all over and done with, the house empty and still,
Dolly Ferrara gone back to her uncle's home. Even the Cove was bare of
fishing craft. He was alone under his own rooftree, alone with an
oppressive silence and his own thoughts.

These were not particularly pleasant thoughts. There was nothing mawkish
about Jack MacRae. He had never been taught to shrink from the
inescapable facts of existence. Even if he had, the war would have cured
him of that weakness. As it was, twelve months in the infantry, nearly
three years in the air, had taught him that death is a commonplace after
a man sees about so much of it, that it is many times a welcome relief
from suffering either of the body or the spirit. He chose to believe
that it had proved so to his father. So his feelings were not that
strange mixture of grief and protest which seizes upon those to whom
death is the ultimate tragedy, the irrevocable disaster, when it falls
upon some one near and dear.

No, Jack MacRae, brooding by his fire, was lonely and saddened and
heavy-hearted. But beneath these neutral phases there was slowly
gathering a flood of feeling unrelated to his father's