er, long ago, had been anything like Miss Betty
Gower. It seemed odd to think that this level-eyed girl's mother might
have been _his_ mother,--if she had been made of stiffer metal, or if
the west wind had blown that afternoon.

He wondered if she knew. Not likely, he decided. It wasn't a story
either Horace Gower or his wife would care to tell their children.

So he did not try to tell her what he meant. He withdrew into his shell.
And when Betty Gower seated herself on a rock and evinced an inclination
to quiz him about things he did not care to be quizzed about, he lifted
his cap, bade her a courteous good-by, and walked back toward the Cove.

CHAPTER V

From the Bottom Up

MacRae did nothing but mark time until he found himself a plain
citizen once more. He could have remained in the service for months
without risk and with much profit to himself. But the fighting was over.
The Germans were whipped. That had been the goal. Having reached it,
MacRae, like thousands of other young men, had no desire to loaf in a
uniform subject to military orders while the politicians wrangled.

But even when he found himself a civilian again, master of his
individual fortunes, he was still a trifle at a loss. He had no definite
plan. He was rather at sea, because all the things he had planned on
doing when he came home had gone by the board. So many things which had
seemed good and desirable had been contingent upon his father. Every
plan he had ever made for the future had included old Donald MacRae and
those wide acres across the end of Squitty. He had been deprived of
both, left without a ready mark to shoot at. The flood of war had
carried him far. The ebb of it had set him back on his native
shores,--stranded him there, so to speak, to pick up the broken threads
of his old life as best he could.

He had no quarrel with that. But he did have a feud with circumstance, a
profound resentment with the past for its hard dealing with his father,
for the blankness of old Donald's last year or two on earth. And a good
deal of this focused on Horace Gower and his works.

"He might have let up on the old man," Jack MacRae would say to himself
resentfully. He would lie awake in the dark thinking about this. "We
were doing our bit. He might have stopped putting spokes in our wheel
while the war was on."

The fact of the matter is that young MacRae was deeply touched in his
family pride as well as his personal sense of inju