own father.
Still, that was unlikely. Donald MacRae had never sold a fish to a Gower
collector. Nor would he himself, young MacRae swore under his breath,
looking sullenly down upon the Rock.

Day after day, month after month, his father had tugged at the oars,
hauled on the line, rowing around and around Poor Man's Rock, skirting
the kelp at the cliff's foot, keeping body and soul together with
unremitting labor in sun and wind and rain, trying to live and save that
little heritage of land for his son.

Jack MacRae sat down on a rock beside a bush and thought about this
sadly. He could have saved his father much if he had known. He could
have assigned his pay. There was a government allowance. He could have
invoked the War Relief Act against foreclosure. Between them they could
have managed. But he understood quite clearly why his father made no
mention of his difficulties. He would have done the same under the same
circumstances himself, played the game to its bitter end without a cry.

But Donald MacRae had made a long, hard fight only to lose in the end,
and his son, with full knowledge of the loneliness and discouragement
and final hopelessness that had been his father's lot, was passing
slowly from sadness to a cumulative anger. That cottage amid its green
grounds bright in a patch of sunshine did not help to soften him. It
stood on land reclaimed from the forest by his father's labor. It should
have belonged to him, and it had passed into hands that already grasped
too much. For thirty years Gower had made silent war on Donald MacRae
because of a woman. It seemed incredible that a grudge born of jealousy
should run so deep, endure so long. But there were the facts. Jack
MacRae accepted them; he could not do otherwise. He came of a breed
which has handed its feuds from generation to generation, interpreting
literally the code of an eye for an eye.

So that as he sat there brooding, it was perhaps a little unfortunate
that the daughter of a man whom he was beginning to regard as a
forthright enemy should have chosen to come to him, tripping soundlessly
over the moss.

He did not hear Betty Gower until she was beside him. Her foot clicked
on a stone and he looked up. Betty was all in white, a glow in her
cheeks and in her eyes, bareheaded, her reddish-brown hair shining in a
smooth roll above her ears.

"I hear you have lost your father," she said simply. "I'm awfully
sorry."

Some peculiar quality of sympa