"So you'll marry him eventually?" MacRae asked.
Dolly nodded.
"If he doesn't change his mind," she murmured. "Oh, I shouldn't say ugly things like that. It sounds cheap and mean."
"But it hurts, it hurts me so to think of it," she broke out passionately. "I can forgive him, because I can see how it happened. Still it hurts. I feel cheated—cheated!"
She lay back in her chair, fingers locked together, red lips parted over white teeth that were clenched together. Her eyes glowed somberly, looking away through distant spaces.
And MacRae, conscious that she had said her say, feeling that she wanted to be alone, as he himself always wanted to fight a grief or a hurt alone and in silence, walked out into the sunshine, where the westerly droned high above in the swaying fir tops.
He went up the path around the Cove's head to the porch of his own house, sat down on the top step, and cursed the Gowers, root and branch. He hated them, everything of the name and blood, at that moment, with a profound and active hatred.
They were like a blight, as their lives touched the lives of other people. They sat in the seats of the mighty, and for their pleasure or their whims others must sweat and suffer. So it seemed to Jack MacRae.
Home, these crowded, hurrying days, was aboard the Blackbird. It was pleasant now to sit on his own doorstep and smell the delicate perfume of the roses and the balsamy odors from the woods behind. But the rooms depressed him when he went in. They were dusty and silent, abandoned to that forsaken air which rests upon uninhabited dwellings. MacRae went out again, to stride aimlessly along the cliffs past the mouth of the Cove.