"That's true enough," Phil sighed. "But the devil of it is, kid, that I wanted this particular girl. And I can't seem to be cheerful about some one else getting her. Maybe it sounds a bit crude, but I'd almost rather it had been any other man I know. Grove's—well, I pass him up. He doesn't play the game. But he gets by. I suppose he always will. Even the governor, who isn't exactly a fool, and who is decent, can't see our worthy brother as he seems to us. Well, that's another chapter. I'm not funking, but I think I'll get off the Norquay band wagon pretty soon. I don't imagine things will seem quite the same around the old place once Mrs. Grove is installed. New brooms, you know."
"Maybe. I don't know. I can easily see where we might begin to feel like intruders in our own home," Rod hazarded. "But what's the use of crossing bridges before you come to 'em?"
"I think," Phil returned, "I've come to a rather important one."
He fell into moody reflection again. Rod leaned against the rail, unwilling to break into this absorption. He knew Phil was smarting under a hurt, the nature of which he could understand very well. And he was hotly on Phil's side, a position he took instinctively whenever Grove appeared as the protagonist.
That it was quite in order for Laska Wall to make her own choice probably carried much less weight with Rod than with Phil. Nor was Rod clearly aware that all his incipient clashes with Grove took root in profound differences of character, rather than in any definite invasion of his rights or Phil's by their elder brother.
There were crossed wires everywhere, he reflected. Why should Phil want Laska so badly, and why should Laska prefer by far the lesser man? These mysterious, passionate wants! Rod wandered idly if Mr. Spence, comfortable in a deck chair, his nose in a red-bound volume, could interpret these strange impulses of the flesh which could so sorely try the spirit? He decided Spence could not. Young as he was, Rod knew there were things in life that cannot be learned. They must be felt, suffered mostly. Lessons in the school of self-experience. Phil, he perceived, was getting a lesson, and taking it seriously. His own turn would come.
He shrugged his shoulders. There would be a different atmosphere about Hawk's Nest when he came home again. But Rod had already encountered the philosophic maxim that change was the only constant factor in a kaleidoscopic universe.
He went up forward, made himself comfortable in the bight of a coiled hawser, let his mind dwell on what green fields and pastures new four years on the Atlantic littoral might open to him.
While he pondered over the immediate future and what it might bring, the Haida plowed down Calm Channel, cleared the Redondas and stood into the open Gulf, reeling off her fourteen knots per hour. Before night he would be in Vancouver. In a week he would be in Montreal. Beyond that Rod could not see, nor, as the sun filled him with a drowsy lassitude, did he greatly care. For four years yet his life would be ordered, directed; he would be a human sponge soaking up knowledge, impressions, experiences common to a university career. After that—
Rod sleepily declined to transform himself into a seer.