He had his wife and his son. He had a given task to accomplish. He had a friend or two to lean on if he needed to lean, Andy Hall, Oliver Thorn, his brother-in-law who wrestled with the Norquay Trust as the angel of the Lord wrestled with Apollyon. In the city office he had two men he could rely on, two heirlooms, two old, very wise, white-mustached men who had handled accounts, costs, sales, during his father's régime and Phil's. And there was Stagg, the butler, and his wife, who elected to remain at Hawk's Nest for the sake of house room and a sentiment Rod understood, valued, was moved by. They were, Stagg said, too old to go into service elsewhere. They had a bit of money put by. Enough to live rent free, but not enough to cope with the cost of town living. They would like to stay at Hawk's Nest and keep it aired and dry, to care for such part of the grounds as Stagg could keep from going to rack. Rod thanked them and let them have their wish. It gave himself and Mary a room always ready when they wanted to spend a day or two there, which they did at times. It was pleasant to sit on those wide porches in blazing August, to watch Rod junior prance across the lawn astride a stick. Hawk's Nest was home in a very dear and intimate sense, even if it could no longer be maintained in the old opulent state. Rod never passed down the channel in the _Haida_ about his business without a lingering, regretful look at that red roof glowing against a background of green timber and great mountains. There remained only one link--apart from his sister Dorothy who came to Hawk's Nest each summer for a month, and in whose Vancouver home the diminished Norquay clan gathered at Christmas--between Rod and the numerous folk who had haunted that place in the old days, the girls he had danced with, the young fellows who had been his contemporaries. That link was Isabel Wall. It seemed a strange friendship. He had always regarded Isabel with a feeling of patient tolerance. She had fallen in love with him once, in her doll-like fashion, to his great embarrassment. She appeared to have no recollection of that episode. She seemed firmly attached to Mary. Between them, diverse as they were, there did exist an intimacy, an understanding, an affection that Rod was slow to fathom, which he did not fathom at all until he began to take serious stock of Isabel and discovered that for all her unchanged pink-and-white prettiness, this diminutive person was really not at all the Isabel Wall of his original conception.