ns, whereas they had suffered all their lives. He had got a
new angle from which to approach his father's story. He knew now that he
had reacted to something that was not there. He had been filled with a
thirst for vengeance, for reprisal, and he had declared war on Gower,
when that was not his father's intent. Old Donald MacRae had hated Gower
profoundly in the beginning. He believed that Gower hated him and had
put the weight of his power against him, wherever and whenever he
could. But life itself had beaten him,--and not Gower. That was what he
had been trying to tell his son.

And life itself had beaten Gower in a strangely similar fashion. He too
was old, a tired, disappointed man. He had reached for material success
with one hand and happiness with the other. One had always eluded him.
The other Jack MacRae had helped wrest from him. MacRae could see
Gower's life in detached pictures, life that consisted of making money
and spending it, life with a woman who whined and sniffled and
complained. These things had been a slow torture. MacRae could no longer
regard this man as a squat ogre, merciless, implacable, ready and able
to crush whatsoever opposed him. He was only a short, fat, oldish man
with tired eyes, who had been bruised by forces he could not understand
or cope with until he had achieved a wistful tolerance for both things
and men.

Both these old men, MacRae perceived, had made a terrible hash of their
lives. Neither of them had succeeded in getting out of life much that a
man instinctively feels that he should get. Both had been capable of
happiness. Both had struggled for happiness as all men struggle. Neither
had ever securely grasped any measure of it, nor even much of content.

MacRae felt a chilly uncertainty as he sat on his doorstep considering
this. He had been traveling the same road for many months,--denying his
natural promptings, stifling a natural passion, surrendering himself to
an obsession of vindictiveness, planning and striving to return evil for
what he conceived to be evil, and being himself corrupted by the
corrosive forces of hatred.

He had been diligently bestowing pain on Betty, who loved him quite
openly and frankly as he desired to be loved; Betty, who was innocent of
these old coils of bitterness, who was primitive enough in her emotions,
MacRae suspected, to let nothing stand between her and her chosen mate
when that mate beckoned.

But she was proud. He knew that he h