His face, streaked and blotched with drying bloodstains, scarred with a
red gash that split his cheek from the hair above one ear to a corner of
his mouth, hardened into ugly lines. His eyes burned again.

This happened many years ago, long before a harassed world had to
reckon with bourgeois and Bolshevik, when profiteer and pacifist had not
yet become words to fill the mouths of men, and not even the politicians
had thought of saving the world for democracy. Yet men and women were
strangely as they are now. A generation may change its manners, its
outward seeming; it does not change in its loving and hating, in its
fundamental passions, its inherent reactions.

MacRae's face worked. His lips quivered as he stared across the troubled
sea. He lifted his hands in a swift gesture of appeal.

"O God," he cried, "curse and blast them in all their ways and
enterprises if they deal with her as they have dealt with me."




CHAPTER I

The House in Cradle Bay


On an afternoon in the first week of November, 1918, under a sky bank
full of murky cloud and an air freighted with a chill which threatened
untimely snow, a man came rowing up along the western side of Squitty
Island and turned into Cradle Bay, which lies under the lee of Point