Rod went about from spot to spot, observing the lilacs, the rhododendrons, the bloom-hidden rockeries, all the fragrant beauty of the grounds and the sanctuary of the massed woods running back of Big Dent. He brought up at last on the float. He looked into a commodious boat-house. His dugout, the brilliant paint a trifle faded, sat on blocks, wide checks in the wood from long drouth. He shoved it into the water, let it fill to soak and swell tight. Then he took a rowboat and pushed out of the bay. A short run of tide made a slow current in the channel. He was well pleased to feel and smell salt water again, to have the sharp odor of kelp in his nostrils, to sniff the aromatic pungence wafted by faint airs out of the banked forest across the cool sea. He had no particular purpose, no explicit destination. Perhaps for that reason, or lack of it, he landed an hour or so later at Oliver Thorn's float. Your natural patrician is alone able to practice democracy without condescension, to meet his fellows on any common ground available. It made no difference to Rod Norquay that Oliver Thorn and his family were completely outside the Norquay orbit socially, financially, perhaps even intellectually,--although the last count was highly debatable. It merely amused Rod to recall that Norquay senior had once frowned on Thorn as a "dreamy-eyed incompetent." Rod knew these people, no matter how or why. He knew them. He liked them. That was sufficient. And there was Mary besides, a stimulus to his adolescent curiosity. He quite frankly wanted to see her again. She had been almost the only real playmate he could associate with the later and most important part of his youth. He had vivid and pleasant memories of her, which had not grown less by two years during which she might have died or married or gone to a far country, for all he knew. There had been one or two stiff little letters, then silence. Rod easily accounted for that. Too many things pressing in on them both. Too acute a self-consciousness. Rod never thought of the manner of their parting without a slight wonder at that queer surge of feeling. He supposed it was the same with Mary Thorn,--a something that made for restraint between them, that could not be overcome by letters. He knew girls without number. He danced with them, rode with them, drove them about in motor cars. Two years of Montreal and three months in Europe had tremendously expanded his experience of femininity. And Mary stood out against this background of girls like an oil portrait among a group of half-tone prints.