verything that was supposed to make life
worth living to men of his type. And he did not seem to care. He seemed
quite content to smoke a pipe and troll for salmon. He seemed to be a
stranger to suffering. He did not even seem to be aware of discomfort,
or of loss.

MacRae had wanted to make him suffer. He had imagined that poverty and
hard, dirty work would be the fittest requital he could bestow. If Jack
MacRae had been gifted with omnipotence when he read that penned history
of his father's life, he would have devised no fitter punishment, no
more fitting vengeance for Gower than that he should lose his fortune
and his prestige and spend his last years getting his bread upon the
waters by Poor Man's Rock in sun and wind and blowy weather.

And MacRae was conscious that if there were any suffering involved in
this matter now, it rested upon him, not upon Gower. Most men past
middle age, who have drunk deeply the pleasant wine of material
success, shrink from the gaunt specter of poverty. They have shot their
bolt. They cannot stand up to hard work. They cannot endure privation.
They lose heart. They go about seeking sympathy, railing against the
fate. They lie down and the world walks unheeding over their prone
bodies.

Gower was not doing that. If he had done so, MacRae would have sneered
at him with contempt. As it was, in spite of the rancor he had nursed,
the feeling which had driven him to reprisal, he found himself
sorry--sorry for himself, sorry for Betty. He had set out to bludgeon
Gower, to humiliate him, and the worst arrows he could sling had blunted
their points against the man's invulnerable spirit.

Betty had been used to luxury. It had not spoiled her. MacRae granted
that. It had not made her set great store by false values. MacRae was
sure of that. She had loved him simply and naturally, with an almost
primitive directness. Spoiled daughters of the leisure class are not so
simple and direct. MacRae began to wonder if she could possibly escape
resenting his share in the overturning of her father's fortunes, whereby
she herself must suffer.

By the time MacRae came slowly to these half-formed, disturbing
conclusions he was already upon the verge of other disturbing
discoveries in the realm of material facts.

For obvious reasons he could not walk up to Gower's house and talk to
Betty. At least he did not see how he could, although there were times
when he was tempted. When he did see her he was ac