shores,--stranded him there, so to speak, to pick up the broken threads
of his old life as best he could.

He had no quarrel with that. But he did have a feud with circumstance, a
profound resentment with the past for its hard dealing with his father,
for the blankness of old Donald's last year or two on earth. And a good
deal of this focused on Horace Gower and his works.

"He might have let up on the old man," Jack MacRae would say to himself
resentfully. He would lie awake in the dark thinking about this. "We
were doing our bit. He might have stopped putting spokes in our wheel
while the war was on."

The fact of the matter is that young MacRae was deeply touched in his
family pride as well as his personal sense of injustice. Gower had
deeply injured his father, therefore it was any MacRae's concern. It
made no difference that the first blow in this quarrel had been struck
before he was born. He smarted under it and all that followed. His only
difficulty was to discern a method of repaying in kind, which he was
thoroughly determined to do.

He saw no way, if the truth be told. He did not even contemplate
inflicting physical injury on Horace Gower. That would have been absurd.
But he wanted to hurt him, to make him squirm, to heap trouble on the
man and watch him break down under the load. And he did not see how he
possibly could. Gower was too well fortified. Four years of war
experience, which likewise embraced a considerable social experience,
had amply shown Jack MacRae the subtle power of money, of political
influence, of family connections, of commercial prestige.