For a few days Rod went about a little, picking up threads of old acquaintance with places and people. The uneasy consciousness of a heart which might fail him at any moment troubled him now and then. Once or twice he felt that strange faltering. But it did not stop--not quite. He wondered if he had passed a crisis that first night at home when he felt himself locked in a grapple with death itself. And so he was very careful. It was easy to be apathetic, to be completely acquiescent. Nothing, he thought, would ever again make his heart swell with such repressed passion as the sights and sounds of the western front, the carnival of non-combatants in Paris and London, the bitterness with which for so long he had seen the agonies and endurances and destructiveness of war as sheer waste--blind, blundering waste, the offspring of cupidity wedded to arrogant ignorance. He wanted to forget what could not be changed. Here it was easy to forget, at least to thrust it all into the background, now that he was home. For a time he would rest. When his heart strengthened he would take stock of his resources and move with determined purpose in some direction, toward some as yet indefinite goal. In the meantime, free from military discipline, interminable parades, orders, red tape that fettered the hands of initiative and bound up a man's mouth so that he needed only two phrases in his vocabulary, "Yes, sir" and "No, sir," he went about in his native city observing, noting, listening in clubs, homes, on the streets, in hotel lobbies where he went to meet other men who had just come back. If the landscape endured and the outstanding architectural features, many things had changed, contrary to his first glad impression, were still changing at an accelerated pace in this winter of 1919. In four years and a half his native city, when he came to examine it closely, presented a transformed physiognomy. Its lifeblood, people and money, flowed in a heavier stream through complicated arteries. Vancouver was bigger and better, he heard on every hand. New industries, shipyards, shipping, more elaborate affairs. The war had done a great deal for British Columbia, an elderly banker naïvely remarked to him. Rod conceded that it probably had. But it had also done something "to" British Columbia. He couldn't say just what. It wasn't clear enough in his mind. But he could feel it. Or perhaps it was only himself. He could not be sure. He could dimly apprehend a difference. His world was changed. Phil was dead. Grandfather Norquay took his long sleep beside other dead Norquays in the plot at Hawk's Nest. Grove flourished largely, a scintillating comet, streaming across the moneyed spaces.