promise. Bit by bit, incident by incident, old Donald traced out of a full heart and bitter memories all the passing years for his son to see and understand. He made Elizabeth Morton, the Morton family, Horace Gower and the Gower kin stand out in bold relief. He told how he, Donald MacRae, a nobody from nowhere, for all they knew, adventuring upon the Pacific Coast, questing carelessly after fortune, had fallen in love with this girl whose family, with less consideration for her feelings and desires than for mutual advantages of land and money and power, favored young Gower and saw nothing but impudent presumption in MacRae.

Young Jack sat staring into the coals, seeing much, understanding more. It was all there in those written pages, a powerful spur to a vivid imagination.

No MacRae had ever lain down unwhipped. Nor had Donald MacRae, his father. Before his bruised face had healed—and young Jack remembered well the thin white scar that 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 mésalliance, 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 

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