Rod felt a keen, deeply personal appreciation of this background. He had looked at the Alps and the Pyrenees and the Highlands since he last saw The Needles looming over Bute Inlet. And he loved his own hills best. He did not care if that stamped him as a provincial. There was something here that stirred him. His native fir and cedar, the maples that flamed along the beaches in autumn, were dearer to him than English oaks. The grassed area about Hawk's Nest, with thick-trunked, lofty trees rooted in noble hundreds, was more beautiful to him that the Forest of Fontainebleau. He was home, and he had never imagined he would be so glad to get home. And he was quite aware that it was neither persons nor things that filled him with this keen satisfaction. In four semesters he had listened to and taken part in many a sophomoric discussion where Art and Beauty went on the dissecting table. To himself he had once defined beauty as such perfection of form, tone, color, expression, as touched human heartstrings to a responsive vibration. It did not matter, he sagely decided, whether this perfection lay in sculpture, architecture, painting, music, literature, in the everlasting hills or the shifting scroll of the sea. The sense of it, the response to it, wherever found, alone differentiated man from the animals. The attempt, more or less successful, to capture something of this beauty, to interpret it, to visualize it in marble, in colors, in words, he took to be the function of art. What art was he did not know. But beauty he could see and feel. He smiled to himself now, recalling bits of discussion between classmen about Art and Beauty. They could become so serious over abstractions. Here a man could forget abstractions. He was like his great-great-grandfather. _This_ fitted him as a glove fits the hand. He glanced across the channel. Oliver Thorn's weathered house stood blended with the forest, the west wind trailing a blue pennant from the chimney. Then he turned to meet Stagg, the butler, who had recognized the single debarkee and come down to welcome him and see about his things. "Who's here, Stagg?" Rod inquired, as they walked up the path. "Your grandfather, Mr. Rod, of course," Stagg answered. "Mrs. Wall, Miss Isabel, Miss Monty Deane, Miss Joe Richston, Mr. Sam Deane, Mr. Harold Collier of Seattle. Mr. Philip has taken them all down to Rock Bay on the _Haida_. We're expecting Mr. Grove and some people on his yacht for the week-end, sir." Rod sought his grandfather in the library. He found the old man with his chair by a French window opening on a small balcony, his thin hands nursing a long-stemmed pipe.