Mary listened, talked in her normal quiet way, turning to him occasionally with a smile that fluttered briefly across her face and made her eyes light up. There was no provocative suggestion about her. It was nothing she did or said that stirred and puzzled Rod. It was merely herself, her presence, a pleasant-faced girl with a low, throaty note in her voice and a slender well-formed body which had a peculiar grace of movement. Magnetic? That overworked term to define the indefinable. What was there about her to stir a man so? Rod asked himself that after he had said good-by to her at five o'clock. And there flitted across his consciousness a faint, troublesome perception of dynamic forces in human relations of which a man must acquire knowledge empirically, concerning which all the textbooks are silent. Rod spent the months of July and August very much as he had spent all the Julys and Augusts of earlier years. That is to say, he paddled a canoe, swam, sailed, fished trout and salmon, made himself agreeable to sundry guests, male and female. About Hawk's Nest no material change appeared, however Rod might vainly wrinkle his brows over a subtle transformation which he could not analyze, but which he felt as a blind man feels the nearness of some insensate mass. He was free from the tutorial direction. Mr. Spence had definitely retired into a pensioned leisure, having done his full duty by this generation of Norquays. Rod was twenty, his brain and his beard both in training for manhood. He could lounge or play as he elected, come and go as he desired. Not so long before, measured by seasons, life had seemed to him the simplest sort of affair. One took it perforce as it came. Certain things were ordered, irrevocable; other things a matter of choice; a few, a very few transitory phases of existence, a matter of chance. McGill, Mary Thorn, Grove, his grandfather, and the old, old journal of Roderick Sylvester Norquay began to make him question this definitely limited philosophy of living. The element of chance loomed larger. It even invaded the sacred precincts of choice. He looked at Mary Thorn as they sat on the porch of her father's house, as they ate a pocket lunch beside the Granite Pool with their rods and creels beside them, as they slipped in the dugout alongshore with the open diapason of the rapids welling up, and he wondered by what necromancy of body or spirit she could so effortlessly set his blood racing, drew his flesh toward her as a magnet draws steel, until his resistance was stoutly tested. How? Why? Rod could explain it simply,--but his explanation failed to satisfy. It rode his imagination as something that transcended mere fleshly instinct, which he understood well enough, of which in his sophisticated world he had observed sundry manifestations.