Rod did not consciously apply his intellect to considering his environment. He felt it. It satisfied him, filled him with an indefinable sense of well-being. His people for a hundred years had filled their eyes with that and found it good. Against this background they had lived and loved and died. No matter. Rod, floating lazily in his canoe, was not looking backward, introspectively considering if he were the sum of five generations, each of which had contributed its quota to subduing a wild land to its use and need, to its ambition as well as to its necessity, and becoming one at last with that portion of the earth the first Roderick Norquay had made his own and handed to his sons. No, eighteen mercifully wears invisible blinkers, and Rod was no exception. Life sat lightly on him. No emotional spur had as yet been forged to rowel him with the barbed thrust of ambition, desire, hot struggle, frustrated hopes and keen dissatisfactions, glows of possession and achievement, dead ashes of loss, all the curious patterns a man must weave with uncertain fingers in the tapestry of his life. So far as Rod was concerned on this bright August day, these things were not. He walked up from the float toward a stone house with a warm red roof of tiles sitting amid a reach of emerald grass and clumps of exotic shrubbery against a background of magnificent native trees, his hands in his trousers pockets, bare-headed, whistling. CHAPTER II The path Rod walked approached the house by a circuitous route. It turned aside here and there like a leisurely pedestrian to skirt red-trunked arbutus with oily-green leaves and clusters of unripe berries, to curve around the base of massive firs that rose like dun pillars in a blue-vaulted forum, to pass great fibrous-barked cedars with drooping boughs wherein unseen squirrels chattered. Everywhere grass clothed the ground, a carpet with green velvet pile, close shorn. Stones great and small had been gathered in artless piles so long ago that their granite nakedness was hidden under thick moss, disguised with ivy, or bright with flowering plants, brilliant dabs of color against vivid greens and somber browns. This walk brought him at last to one end of a great stone house with wide, cool porches, deep window recesses, a roof of tiles that glowed in the sun like a cardinal's hat.