"Don't ever think the idea of any sort of restitution occurred to him, Rod," she declared. "He wouldn't even understand the idea of such a thing. He has always admired this place, secretly longed to have something like it, and he has discrimination enough to know he couldn't create it in his lifetime. He'd buy Hawk's Nest like a shot. He has dreams of founding a Wall dynasty, I really believe. A place like this, made to order, with its history--why, he'd gloat over it. The parvenu idea of acquiring prestige by purchase--by proxy. I know I sound horrid, but it's true. He thinks the Norquays have gone to seed. And that the Walls only require a proper background to be somebody. It's amusing and sometimes almost tragic--this social pushing, this itch to be thought something you aren't, to make a big splash. Did he seem keen on it, Rod?" "Rather." "Mamma's been priming him," Isabel nodded. "I've heard her talk about the possibility--since you've been supposed to be in deep water. She thinks Bob's a perfect gentleman--even if his father isn't quite--when Robert's merely a good little spender. Poor old daddy. He's the best of the lot, because he just naturally can't help being a ruthless old pirate, and he never held a grudge in his life against any one who beat him at his own game. He's a bear at making money and mom's a bear in society, and they've raised Bob and Laska and me to be bearcats of one sort and another too. Some combination." Isabel applied herself to the salad for half a minute. "Suppose you go aboard the yacht with me and I'll introduce you to dad," she proposed mischievously to Andy. "I have no objection," he returned calmly. "Neither have I the slightest desire to meet your male parent--whose only merit in my eyes is that he is your parent. I couldn't use him in my business, and it's a cinch he couldn't use me in his." "He might," Isabel teased. "He has lots of irons in the fire and loads of money. You sure did marry money, Andy, old scout." "Well, I have irons in the fire myself," Andy retorted imperturbably. "And without any hankering for loads of money I expect to get all I need." The pair of them sauntered off after dinner, still facetiously debating what they called the possibilities of a Hall-Wall entente. Rod and Mary went out on the porch. The rapids murmured in a rising key. Young Rod, who had learned to read under his mother's tutelage, curled up in a chair with a book of fairy tales. The sun dipped below the jagged backbone of Vancouver Island and the afterglow lingered, a radiant tinge over the blurred slopes that lifted to high mountains on the mainland shore.