t crossed his father's cheek bone--Donald
MacRae was again pursuing his heart's desire. But he was forestalled
there. He had truly said to Elizabeth Morton that she would never have
another chance. By force or persuasion or whatsoever means were
necessary they had married her out of hand to Horace Gower.

"That must have been she sitting on the couch," Jack MacRae whispered to
himself, "that middle-aged woman with the faded rose-leaf face. Lord,
Lord, how things get twisted!"

Though they so closed the avenue to a mesalliance, still their pride
must have smarted because of that clandestine affection, that boldly
attempted elopement. Most of all, young Gower must have hated
MacRae--with almost the same jealous intensity that Donald MacRae must
for a time have hated him--because Gower apparently never forgot and
never forgave. Long after Donald MacRae outgrew that passion Gower had
continued secretly to harass him. Certain things could not be otherwise
accounted for, Donald MacRae wrote to his son. Gower functioned in the
salmon trade, in timber, in politics. In whatever MacRae set on foot, he
ultimately discerned the hand of Gower, implacable, hidden, striking at
him from under cover.

And so in a land and during a period when men created fortunes easily
out of nothing, or walked carelessly over golden opportunities, Donald
MacRae got him no great store of worldly goods, whereas Horace Gower,
after one venture in which he speedily dissipated an inherited fortune,
drove straight to successful outcome in everything he touched. By the
time young Jack MacRae outgrew the Island teachers and must go to
Vancouver for high school and then to the University of British
Columbia, old Donald had been compelled to borrow money on his land to
meet these expenses.

Young Jack, sitting by the fire, winced when he thought of that. He had
taken things for granted. The war had come in his second year at the
university,--and he had gone to the front as a matter of course.

Failing fish prices, poor seasons, other minor disasters had
followed,--and always in the background, as old Donald saw it, the Gower
influence, malign, vindictive, harboring that ancient grudge.

Whereas in the beginning MacRae had confidently expected by one resource
and another to meet easily the obligation he had incurred, the end of it
was the loss, during the second year of the war, of all the MacRae
lands on Squitty,--all but a rocky corner of a few acres whi