at hungry longing for her.
While he suffered from that vain longing there was neither peace nor
content in his life; he could get no satisfaction out of working or
planning or anything that he undertook.

That would wear off, he assured himself. But he did not always have
complete confidence in this assurance. He was aware of a tenacity of
impressions and emotions and ideas, once they took hold of him. Old
Donald MacRae had been afflicted with just such characteristics, he
remembered. It must be in the blood, that stubborn constancy to either
an affection or a purpose. And in him these two things were at war,
pulling him powerfully in opposite directions, making him unhappy.

Sitting deep in a leather chair, watching the white and red balls roll
and click on the green cloth, MacRae recalled one of the maxims of
Hafiz:

"'Two things greater than all things are
And one is Love and the other is War.'"

MacRae doubted this. He had had experience of both. At the moment he
could see nothing in either but vast accumulations of futile anguish
both of the body and the soul.

CHAPTER XVIII

A Renewal of Hostilities

The pussy willows had put out their fuzzy catkins and shed them for
delicate foliage when MacRae came back to Squitty Cove. The alder, the
maple and the wild cherry, all the spring-budding trees and shrubs, were
making thicket and foreshore dainty green and full of pleasant smells.
Jack wakened the first morning at daybreak to the muted orchestration of
mating birds, the song of a thousand sweet-voiced, unseen warblers. The
days were growing warm, full of sunshine. Distant mountain ranges stood
white-capped and purple against sapphire skies. The air was full of the
ancient magic of spring.

Yet MacRae himself, in spite of these pleasant sights and sounds and
smells, in spite of his books and his own rooftree, found the Cove
haunted by the twin ghosts he dreaded most, discontent and loneliness.
He was more isolated than he had ever been in his life. There was no one
in the Cove save an old, unkempt Swede, Doug Sproul, who slept eighteen
hours a day in his cabin while he waited for the salmon to run again, a
withered Portuguese who sat in the sun and muttered while he mended
gear. They were old men, human driftwood, beached in their declining
years, crabbed and sour, looking always backward with unconscious
regret.

Vin Ferrara was away with the _Bluebird_, still plyin