ashore. There were rowboat trollers on the beach asleep in their tents and rude lean-tos. He walked over the low ridge behind which stood Peter Ferrara's house. It was hot, the wooded heights of the island shutting off the cool westerly. On such a day Peter Ferrara should be dozing on his porch and Dolly perhaps mending stockings or sewing in a rocker beside him.

But the porch was bare. As MacRae drew near the house a man came out the door and down the three low steps. He was short and thick-set, young, quite fair, inclined already to floridness of skin. MacRae knew him at once for Norman Gower. He was a typical Gower,—a second edition of his father, save that his face was less suggestive of power, less heavily marked with sullenness.

He glanced with blank indifference at Jack MacRae, passed within six feet and walked along the path which ran around the head of the Cove. MacRae watched him. He would cross between the boathouse and the roses in MacRae's dooryard. MacRae had an impulse to stride after him, to forbid harshly any such trespass on MacRae ground. But he smiled at that childishness. It was childish, MacRae knew. But he felt that way about it, just as he often felt that he himself had a perfect right to range the whole end of Squitty, to tramp across greensward and through forest depths, despite Horace Gower's legal title to the land. MacRae was aware of this anomaly in his attitude, without troubling to analyze it.

He walked into old Peter's house without announcement beyond his footsteps on the floor, as he had been accustomed to do as far back as he could remember. Dolly was sitting beside a little table, her chin in her palms. There was a droop to her body that disturbed MacRae. She had sat for hours like that the night his father died. And there was now on her face something of the same look of sad resignation and pity. Her big, dark eyes were misty, troubled, when she lifted them to MacRae.

"Hello, Jack," she said.

He came up to her, put his hands on her shoulders.

"What is it now?" he demanded. "I saw Norman Gower leaving as I came up. And here you're looking—what's wrong?"

His tone was imperative.

"Nothing, Johnny."

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