But neither objurgation nor self-bestowed epithets could rid him of that heavy feeling in his breast. CHAPTER IX On an afternoon a week later Rod sat in the library nursing a book, a cigarette, and some curiously mixed reflections. A week-end party had come and gone, leaving Laska, her maid, and a friend at Hawk's Nest. Whereupon Phil had taken the _Haida_ and departed for a point up the coast. The old restful quiet had succeeded that forty-eight hours of good-natured glamor, the laughter and drinking and dancing, in which Rod, morose and broody, seemed to detect an irritatingly hectic note. He was glad they were gone, glad to see the _Kowloon_ clear of Mermaid Bay. Grove was getting beefier, more assertive, more arrogant. He was so cocksure, so frankly contemptuous of things and persons outside his own sphere. Yet by all accounts Grove was becoming a reckonable power in the affairs of B.C. There was a dash and sweep about his operations that moved men to admiration. He had been tremendously successful in all he undertook, far more so than Rod had believed possible. The Norquay Trust Company was a three-ring circus and Grove was the ringmaster. Lesser men and concerns leaped and curvetted when he cracked his whip. He was fond of cracking the whip, Rod cynically observed. Rod eyed his father, sitting on the other side of a periodical-strewn table. He wondered what his father thought of Grove now. But he knew that his father was thinking of quite another matter,--for which he was himself responsible. He continued to look at Norquay senior with a mildly expectant curiosity. The library was the council chamber of the family, the place chosen for edicts, discussions of policy, admonition. From childhood Rod and his brothers had, so to speak, taken their medicine in that pleasant book-lined room. His father now bent a placid eye, slightly quizzical, on his youngest son. Rod waited. "I really don't see the necessity," Norquay senior remarked at last. "Of course a gentleman need not necessarily be a drone. On the other hand one doesn't need to do a laborer's work in order to acquire knowledge of labor. You've finished school, of course. You have seen a little of the world and as time passes you will undoubtedly see a great deal more. Still, if you're keen on this, I'll speak to Phil. He can give you charge of a camp." "I don't want to take charge of a camp," Rod said. "I'm not competent, for one thing. I'd either make a hash of it, or leave it all to a foreman--which is not what I'm after. What I mean by going into the woods is to go in and work; take over jobs as I master them. I want to know all there is to be known about timber, from the standing tree to the finished product." His father continued to eye him. "What's the idea for such thoroughness--this starting in at the bottom and getting blisters and experience together?"