That a capacity for thinking about such things in such fashion was scarcely the normal intellectual equipment of an eighteen-year-old youth did not occur to Rod. He had the singularly unboyish quality of hoarding his thoughts, of living very much in a reflective world of his own, which he shared with no one; which indeed he sedulously masked from every one he knew, unless it was Mary Thorn. Even to Mary he permitted only shy, stray glimpses of what sometimes crowded his brain, as a concession to her confident belief in him, her conviction that the most fanciful thing he could utter was at least worth consideration merely because he saw fit to give it utterance. Whereas any groping effort to encase an abstraction in words served only to bring an amused look to the collective faces of his own people. His father would lift heavy eyebrows in polite surprise. Grove would laugh coarsely. Even Phil would look a little puzzled, a little bored. Rod knew. He seldom made such experiments in self-expression. But his mind would concentrate with burning eagerness on a great variety of things. And sometimes his conclusions saddened him without his knowing why. This decree of banishment from Hawk's Nest in mid-summer provoked him to sullen pondering in the quiet of his own room. He recognized authority. Obedience was an observed tradition in that house. It was not the fact of his being bundled off to a university that troubled Rod. He had looked forward to that as a necessary and perhaps delightful experience. It was the snap judgment which hastened the date of this mental discipline--as if it were a penalty inflicted on him for an offence--as if he were a small child caught with his fingers in the jam pot. So Rod, sitting with his elbows on the window sill looking out on the tiderace streaming full flood between Valdez and Big Dent, seeing the glassy green incline and the white flash of foam, wondered irritably why his father saw fit to penalize him, to warn him in that offensive, suggestive manner about Mary Thorn. There was no ground for that. Rod knew his father as a fair-minded man, not much given to moralizing, nor arbitrarily instructing his sons in ethical problems. He wouldn't have issued a fiat like that without some one stirring him up. Rod scowled. He could guess pretty well who had done the stirring; who, being not too nice in surreptitious amours himself, was inordinately jealous how the family dignity, the family honor fared in his brothers' hands. Which was a very precise summary of one phase of Mr. Grosvenor Sylvester Norquay. It wasn't a flattering estimate of character and Rod kept it strictly to himself. When he was small he had disliked Grove's high-handed style, his tendency to domineer, an occasional outcrop of a brutal streak. As Rod grew older that dislike became contempt, deep and abiding. A queer feeling to exist between brothers. Yet not so rare.