He shrugged his shoulders. There would be a different atmosphere about Hawk's Nest when he came home again. But Rod had already encountered the philosophic maxim that change was the only constant factor in a kaleidoscopic universe. He went up forward, made himself comfortable in the bight of a coiled hawser, let his mind dwell on what green fields and pastures new four years on the Atlantic littoral might open to him. While he pondered over the immediate future and what it might bring, the _Haida_ plowed down Calm Channel, cleared the Redondas and stood into the open Gulf, reeling off her fourteen knots per hour. Before night he would be in Vancouver. In a week he would be in Montreal. Beyond that Rod could not see, nor, as the sun filled him with a drowsy lassitude, did he greatly care. For four years yet his life would be ordered, directed; he would be a human sponge soaking up knowledge, impressions, experiences common to a university career. After that-- Rod sleepily declined to transform himself into a seer. CHAPTER V When the deck hands had dumped a trunk, a bag, a suitcase and sundry bundles on the float and the _Camosun_ had backed into the stream, Rod still stood looking about him, trying to mark changes and finding none. He had been away almost two years. He might have been gone only overnight for all the external difference in what he saw. Time's scythe had mowed no grass, felled no trees, had left untouched the bold contours of his native hills, had neither added to nor taken away from the well-remembered tintings of sky and sea, the delicate shadings of the green forest which seemed to hold its own on every hand against the continuous onslaught of the logger. It was as if the puny axes and saws of man could no more than make tiny openings in that incredible stretch of coastal forest. Pygmies attacking a giant in the vast amphitheater of the changeless hills! Except for the stone house with a roof that gleamed like burnished copper in its setting of lawn against the deep olive of massed boughs, all that Rod Norquay could see by turning on his heel must have been bared to his eye much as it was bared to the gaze of his great-great-grandfather on the poop of the _Hermes_ in 1797. Earth and water, air and sky. The changeless elements. Life was a flux, but the hills endured, and the sea. Man could ravage the forests in the name of industry. But the forest would grow again. Those high aloof mountains, with glaciers clinging on their shoulders, held out welcoming hands to Rod as they had seemed to welcome the first of his name a century before. They would be there, flinging vast shadows at sunrise and sundown, bearing their robes of dusky green and royal purple and virgin white long after he was gone.