“You could call that intuition.”

“Bugger intuition! That’s a psychological word, grey and dowdy. I prefer the notion of a daimon. Know the names of any good daimons, Maria?”

“I’ve only come across the name of one, engraved on an old gem. It was Maimas. D’you know, Simon, I think I’m getting a little drunk too. Now, if you could just get the ear of the Lesser Zadkiel and—well, call him Maimas—you’d have all you want about Francis Cornish.”

“Wouldn’t I, by God! I’d have what I want. I’d know what was bred in the bone of old Francis. Because what’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh, and we should never forget it.—Oh, I really must go.”

Darcourt gulped the remainder of his drink, kissed Maria impressionistically—in the region of the nose—and stumbled toward the door.

Not too steadily, Maria rose and took him by the arm. Should she offer to drive him home? No, that might make things worse than if he made it himself, refreshed by the cool night air. But she went with him to the hallway of the penthouse on top of the condominium where she and Arthur lived, and steered him toward the elevator.

The doors closed, but as he descended, she could hear him shouting, “What’s bred in the bone! Oh, what was bred in bone?”

To begin, when Francis was born there, Blairlogie was not the Jumping-Off Place, and would have strongly resented any such suggestion. It thought of itself as a thriving town, and for its inhabitants the navel of the universe. It knew itself to be moving forward confidently into the twentieth century, which Canada’s great Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, had declared to be peculiarly Canada’s. What might have appeared to an outsider to be flaws or restrictions were seen by Blairlogie as advantages. The roads around it were certainly bad, but they had always been bad so long as they had been roads, and the people who used them accepted them as facts of their existence. If the greater world wished to approach Blairlogie, it could very well do so by the train which made the sixty-mile journey from Ottawa over a rough line, much of it cut through the hardest granite of the Laurentian Shield, a land mass of mythic antiquity. Blairlogie saw no reason to be easily accessible.

The best of the town’s money and business was firmly in the hands of the Scots, as was right and proper. Below the Scots, in a ranking that was decreed by money, came a larger population of Canadians of French descent, some of whom were substantial merchants. At the bottom of the financial and social heap were the Poles, a body of labourers and small farmers from which the upper ranks drew their domestic servants. Altogether the town numbered about five thousand carefully differentiated souls.

The Scots were Presbyterian, and as this was Canada at the turn of the century their religious belief and their political loyalty were the important conditioning factors in their lives. These Presbyterians might have had some trouble in formulating the doctrine of predestination or foreordination which lay deep in their belief, but they had no practical difficulty in knowing who was of the elect, and who belonged to a creation with a less certain future in Eternity.

The French and the Poles were Roman Catholics, and they too knew precisely where they stood in relation to God, and were by no means displeased with their situation. There were a few Irish, also Catholics, and some odds and ends of other racial strains—mongrels of one sort and another—who had mean churches suited to their eccentricities, dwindling toward a vacant-store temple that changed hands from one rampaging evangelist to another, in whose windows hung gaudy banners displaying the Beasts of the Apocalypse, in horrendous detail. There were no Jews, blacks, or other incalculable elements.

The town could have been represented as a wedding-cake, with the Poles as the large foundation layer, bearing the heaviest weight; the French, the middle layer, were smaller but central; the Scots were the topmost, smallest, most richly ornamented layer of all.

No town is simple in every respect. People who liked perfection and tidiness of structure were puzzled by the quirk of fate which decreed that the Senator, by far the richest and most influential man in Blairlogie, cut right across accepted ideas: though a Scot, he was an R.C., and though rich he was a Liberal, and his wife was French.

The Senator was the person to begin with, for he was Francis Chegwidden Cornish’s grandfather, and the origin of the wealth that supported Francis’s life until he gained a mysterious fortune of his own.

The Senator was the Honourable James Ignatius McRory, born on the Isle of Barra in the Hebrides in 1855, who had been brought to Canada in 1857 by parents who were, like so many of their kind, starving in their beautiful homeland. They never succeeded in getting the ache of starvation and bitter poverty out of their bones, though they did better in the New World than they could have done at home. But their son James—called Hamish by them, because that was his name in the Gaelic they customarily spoke between themselves—hated starvation and resolved as a child to put poverty well behind him, and did so. Necessity sent him early to work in the forests which were a part of the wealth of Canada, and ambition and daring, combined with an inborn long-headedness (to say nothing of his skill with his fists, and his feet when fists were not enough), made him a forest boss very young, and a contractor for lumber companies shortly after, and the owner of a lumber company of his own before he was thirty, by which time he was already a rich man.

A common enough story, but, like everything else connected with Hamish, not without its individual touches. He did not marry into a lumbering family, to advance himself, but made a love-match with Marie-Louise Thibodeau when he was twenty-seven and she was twenty, and he never desired any other woman afterward. Nor did the life in the camps make him hard and remorseless; he treated his men fairly when he was an employer, and when he came to have money he gave generously to charity and to the Liberal Party.

Indeed, the Liberal Party was, after Marie-Louise and one other, the great love of his life. He never stood for Parliament, but he supported and financed men who did so; in so far as there was a party machine in Blairlogie, where he settled as soon as he no longer had to live near the forests, Hamish McRory was the brains behind the machine; thus nobody was surprised when Sir Wilfrid Laurier appointed him to the Senate when he was not yet forty-five, making him the youngest man, and demonstrably one of the ablest, in the Upper House.

A Canadian senator was, in those days, appointed for life, and some senators were known to give up all political effort once they felt their feet on the red carpet of the Upper Chamber. But Hamish had no intention of relaxing his party zeal because of his new honour, and as a senator he was more Sir Wilfrid’s man in an important area of the Ottawa Valley than ever before.