f it be true that a man keeps his loves and
hates and hobbies and ambitions and appetites in separate chambers, any
of which may be for a time so locked that what lies therein neither
troubles nor pleases him, then that chamber in which he kept Betty
Gower's image was hermetically sealed. Her figure was obscured by other
figures,--his father and Horace Gower and himself.

Not until he had reached the Cove's head and come to his own house did
he recall that Betty had gone along the cliffs, and that he had not seen
her as he passed. But that could easily happen, he knew, in that mile
stretch of trees and thickets, those deep clefts and pockets in the
rocky wall that frowned upon the sea.

He went into the house. Out of a box on a shelf in his room he took the
message his father had left him and sitting down in the shadowy coolness
of the outer room began to read it again, slowly, with infinite care for
the reality his father had meant to convey.

All his life, as Jack remembered him, Donald MacRae had been a silent
man, who never talked of how he felt, how things affected him, who never
was stricken with that irresistible impulse to explain and discuss, to
relieve his troubled soul with words, which afflicts so many men. It
seemed as if he had saved it all for that final summing-up which was to
be delivered by his pen instead of his lips. He had become articulate
only at the last. It must have taken him weeks upon weeks to write it
all down, this autobiography which had been the mainspring of his son's
actions for nearly two years. There was wind and sun in it, and blue sky
and the gray Gulf heaving; somber colors, passion and grief, an apology
and a justification.

MacRae laid down the last page and went outside to sit on the steps.
Shadows were gathering on the Cove. Far out, the last gleam of the sun
was touching the Gulf. A slow swell was rising before some far,
unheralded wind. The _Blanco_ came gliding in and dropped anchor.
Trollers began to follow. They clustered about the big carrier like
chickens under the mother wing. By these signs MacRae knew that the fish
had stopped biting, that it was lumpy by Poor Man's Rock. He knew there
was work aboard. But he sat there, absent-eyed, thinking.

He was full of understanding pity for his father, and also for Horace
Gower. He was conscious of being a little sorry for himself. But then he
had only been troubled a short two years by this curious aftermath of
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