He came home from one of these desultory excursions abroad a little before dinner one evening. "Your father has phoned twice since five o'clock," Mary told him. "He asked to have you call him up when you came in." Rod got his connection. "You telephoned, pater," he said. "Was it anything of importance?" "Well, yes. Can you come down to the club after dinner, Rod? If not to-night, then by nine in the morning?" "I'll come to-night. Say eight o'clock." He hung up the receiver. As he got ready for dinner his mind was divided between the playful squeals of his son romping in the living room and the almost plaintive note in his father's voice over the wire. Norquay senior had changed with everything else. He had aged. Losing Phil had been a blow. But he was a proud man--and he had two sons left. That grief had not put care lines in his face, or caused the abstracted brooding into which he sometimes relapsed. Rod understood, of course, that the war had completed the break-up of the old family life at Hawk's Nest which Grove's embarkation on a career had begun, or Grove's personality had begun. His father admitted that he no longer cared to live at Hawk's Nest. "One doesn't like to be alone all the time," he had put it quite simply. "Too many ghosts haunt those corridors for an old man. And at one's age one doesn't care to set up an establishment in town. When any of the others find occasion in summer, I go to Hawk's Nest. Otherwise I live at the club." Yet the place was kept up. Stagg, the butler, his wife who ranked as housekeeper, a cook, two maids, and two gardeners held a sinecure. One could, Rod assumed, step in and find Hawk's Nest quite as of old. He came back to his father. What bothered him? It couldn't be money or affairs. The Norquay estate was rock-ribbed. Timber, land, gilt-edged securities. It must simply be that he was getting old and lonely. When a man is past sixty and all his life has been spent in a well-appointed home, surrounded by a fairly numerous family and still more numerous relatives, he can hardly reconcile himself to the empty shell of a house, or the artificial atmosphere of even the most elaborately appointed club. Rod felt sorry for him. But if Grove hadn't failed to carry on the family tradition, Hawk's Nest would still be the year-around rendezvous of the clan, as it had always been. No effect without a cause. Rod put aside the thought that his elder brother could be blamed for a great deal if one chose to be critical. His father sat smoking a cigar in a chair that commanded the club entrance, and he led the way to his rooms as soon as Rod appeared.