"It isn't quite so simple as that," she explained. "I couldn't go unless your father rather made a point of it to Grove. Grove's funny. He isn't at all keen on me going there, except when we cruise up on a week-end. And I'd like to go there and stay awhile, quietly. I'm fed up with Vancouver. I'm tired. I want to rest." "You can't think what a giddy whirl we live in," she went on presently. "Dinner parties, general hilarity; just one thing after another. One has to go whether one feels up to it or not. One gets so weary of it. Get your father to have me come to Hawk's Nest, Rod dear." Rod promised. She went off on another tack after that. With a touch of malice she brightly recounted the quasi-scandal pertaining to certain people in their set, people Rod knew slightly. It seemed to afford her ironic amusement. "But," Rod observed in comment on a rather piquant anecdote concerning a pretty widow and a man of family who cut a big figure in local industry, "that's pretty raw if it's true. And if it's just gossip, it's rotten nasty gossip." "I shouldn't be surprised if it were quite true," she said indifferently. "Some people do what they like. Others have to toe the line. It's a queer, queer world, Rod." He left about two-thirty. Striding up Robson Street to Mary's boarding place, he shook off a half-formed impression that Laska was bored and discontented, that she found the only world she knew a rather hollow affair. There was a vague fretfulness about her. It was just an impression. And it was not his concern. Mary Thorn was decidedly his concern, for that afternoon at least. Laska, Grove, the Norquay Trust vanished out of his mind at sight of Mary Thorn. For, as he walked beside her along a street which led to the sandy foreshore and green reaches of Stanley Park, Rod found himself stirred by a strange procession of fancies. They trooped through his mind, quickened his blood. What was there about a girl (a pretty girl, but of no great beauty compared to other girls he knew) in a white organdie dress, with a rather immobile face shadowed under the floppy brim of a leghorn hat, to stir him so, to make him desire nearness to her and to find that nearness disturbing? Rod's brain registered flashes of himself holding her close, of her face smiling into his,--unwelcome visions like that while his lips uttered sentences about Montreal, continental Europe, books, plays he had seen, such _pronunciamento_ generally as the conversation required of a second-year university man who had been abroad. "I wonder if this is the way a man starts in getting foolish over some particular girl?" Rod thought to himself, "Or am I just like Grove and some fellows I know?" This while he told her of a quaint old place in Scotland, where he had visited a branch of distant kin, the summer before.