falling in the Gulf swell, staring at the sea and the sky and the
wheeling gulls, dreaming and keeping her dreams shyly to herself,--as he
did. They did not always need words for understanding. And so they did
not talk now for the sake of talking, pour out words lest silence bring
embarrassment. Dolly sat resting her chin in one hand, looking at him
impersonally, yet critically, he felt. He smoked a cigarette and held
his peace until the labored breathing of the sick man changed to
disjointed, muttering, incoherent fragments of speech.

Dolly went to him at once. MacRae lingered to divest himself of the
brown overalls so that he stood forth in his uniform, the R.A.F. uniform
with the two black wings joined to a circle on his left breast and below
that the multicolored ribbon of a decoration. Then he went in to his
father.

Donald MacRae was far gone. His son needed no M.D. to tell him that. He
burned with a high fever which had consumed his flesh and strength in
its furnace. His eyes gleamed unnaturally, with no light of recognition
for either his son or Dolly Ferrara. And there was a peculiar tinge to
the old man's lips that chilled young MacRae, the mark of the Spanish
flu in its deadliest manifestation. It made him ache to see that gray
head shift from side to side, to listen to the incoherent babble, to
mark the feeble shiftings of the nervous hands.

For a terrible half hour he endured the sight of his father struggling
for breath, being racked by spasms of coughing. Then the reaction came
and the sick man slept,--not a healthy, restful sleep; it was more like
the dying stupor of exhaustion. Young MacRae knew that.

He knew with disturbing certainty that without skilled