The car left Winnipeg that night for the Rockies. An old man, in a crowded emigrant car, with a bundle under his arm, watched the arrival of the Gaddesden party. He saw Anderson accost them on the platform, and then make his way to his own coach just ahead of them.

The train sped westwards through the Manitoba farms and villages. Anderson slept intermittently, haunted by various important affairs that were on his mind, and by recollections of the afternoon. Meanwhile, in the front of the train, the paragraph from the Winnipeg Chronicle lay carefully folded in an old tramp's waistcoat pocket.



CHAPTER V

"I say, Elizabeth, you're not going to sit out there all day, and get your death of cold? Why don't you come in and read a novel like a sensible woman?"

"Because I can read a novel at home—and I can't see Canada."

"See Canada! What is there to see?" The youth with the scornful voice came to lean against the doorway beside her. "A patch of corn—miles and miles of some withered stuff that calls itself grass, all of it as flat as your hand—oh! and, by Jove! a little brown fellow—gopher, is that their silly name?—scootling along the line. Go it, young 'un!" Philip shied the round end of a biscuit tin after the disappearing brown thing. "A boggy lake with a kind of salt fringe—unhealthy and horrid and beastly—a wretched farm building—et cetera, et cetera!"

"Oh! look there, Philip—here is a school!"

Elizabeth bent forward eagerly. On the bare prairie stood a small white house, like the house that children draw on their slates: a chimney in the middle, a door, a window on either side. Outside, about twenty children playing and dancing. Inside, through the wide-open doorway a vision of desks and a few bending heads.

Philip's patience was put to it. Had she supposed that children went without schools in Canada?

But she took no heed of him.

"Look how lovely the children are, and how happy! What'll Canada be when they are old? And not another sign of habitation anywhere—nothing—but the little house—on the bare wide earth! And there they dance, as though the world belonged to them. So it does!"

"And my sister to a lunatic asylum!" said Philip, exasperated. "I say, why doesn't that man Anderson come and see us?"

"He promised to come in and lunch."

"He's an awfully decent kind of fellow," said the boy warmly.

Elizabeth opened her eyes.

"I didn't know you had taken any notice of him, Philip."

"No more I did," was the candid reply. "But did you see what he brought me this morning?" He pointed to the seat behind him, littered with novels, which Elizabeth recognized as new additions to their travelling store. "He begged or borrowed them somewhere from his friends or people in the hotel; told me frankly he knew I should be bored to-day, and might want them. Rather 'cute of him, wasn't it?"

Elizabeth was touched. Philip had certainly shown rather scant civility to Mr. Anderson, and this trait of thoughtfulness for a sickly and capricious traveller appealed to her.

"I suppose Delaine will be here directly?" Philip went on.

"I suppose so."

Philip let himself down into the seat beside her.

"Look here, Elizabeth," lowering his voice; "I don't think Delaine is any more excited about Canada than I am. He told me last night he thought the country about Winnipeg perfectly hideous."

"Oh!" cried Elizabeth, as though someone had flipped her.

"You'll have to pay him for this journey, Elizabeth. Why did you ask him to come?"

"I didn't ask him, Philip. He asked himself."

"Ah! but you let him come," said the youth shrewdly. "I think, Elizabeth, you're not behaving quite nicely."

"How am I not behaving nicely?"

"Well, you don't pay any attention to him. Do you know what he was doing while you were looking at the cows yesterday?"

Elizabeth reluctantly confessed that she had no idea.

"Well, he was sitting by a lake—a kind of swamp—at the back of the house, reading a book." Philip went off into a fit of laughter.

"Poor Mr. Delaine!" cried Elizabeth, though she too laughed. "It was probably Greek," she added pensively.

"Well, that's funnier still. You know, Elizabeth, he could read Greek at home. It's because you were neglecting him."

"Don't rub it in, Philip," said Elizabeth, flushing. Then she moved up to him and laid a coaxing hand on his arm. "Do you know that I have been awake half the night?"

"All along of Delaine? Shall I tell him?"

"Philip, I just want you to be a dear, and hold your tongue," said Lady Merton entreatingly. "When there's anything to tell, I'll tell you. And if I have—"

"Have what?"

"Behaved like a fool, you'll have to stand by me." An expression of pain passed over her face.

"Oh, I'll stand by you. I don't know that I want Mr. Arthur for an extra bear-leader, if that's what you mean. You and mother are quite enough. Hullo! Here he is."

A little later Delaine and Elizabeth were sitting side by side on the garden chairs, four of which could just be fitted into the little railed platform at the rear of the car. Elizabeth was making herself agreeable, and doing it, for a time, with energy. Nothing also could have been more energetic than Delaine's attempts to meet her. He had been studying Baedeker, and he made intelligent travellers' remarks on the subject of Southern Saskatchewan. He discussed the American "trek" into the province from the adjoining States. He understood the new public buildings of Regina were to be really fine, only to be surpassed by those at Edmonton. He admired the effects of light and shadow on the wide expanse; and noticed the peculiarities of the alkaline lakes.

Meanwhile, as he became more expansive, Elizabeth contracted. One would have thought soon that Canada had ceased to interest her at all. She led him slyly on to other topics, and presently the real Arthur Delaine emerged. Had she heard of the most recent Etruscan excavations at Grosseto? Wonderful! A whole host of new clues! Boni—Lanciani—the whole learned world in commotion. A fragment of what might very possibly turn out to be a bi-lingual inscription was the last find. Were we at last on the brink of solving the old, the eternal enigma?

He threw himself back in his chair, transformed once more into the talkative, agreeable person that Europe knew. His black and grizzled hair, falling perpetually forward in strong waves, made a fine frame for his grey eyes and large, well-cut features. He had a slight stammer, which increased when he was animated, and a trick of forever pushing back the troublesome front locks of hair.

Elizabeth listened for a long, long time, and at last—could have cried like a baby because she was missing so much! There was a chance, she knew, all along this portion of the line, of seeing antelope and coyotes, if only one kept one's eyes open; not to speak of the gophers—enchanting little fellows, quite new to such travellers as she—who seemed to choose the very railway line itself, by preference, for their burrowings and their social gatherings. Then, as she saw, the wheat country was nearly done; a great change was in progress; her curiosity sprang to meet it. Droves of horses and cattle began to appear at rare intervals on the vast expanse. No white, tree-sheltered farms here, like the farms in Manitoba; but scattered at long distances, near the railway or on the horizon, the first primitive dwellings of the new settlers—the rude "shack" of the first year—beginnings of villages—sketches of towns.

"I have always thought the Etruscan problem the most fascinating in the whole world," cried Delaine, with pleasant enthusiasm. "When you consider all its bearings, linguistic and historical—"

"Oh! do you see," exclaimed Elizabeth, pointing—"do you see all those lines and posts, far out to the horizon? Do you know that all these lonely farms are connected with each other and the railway by telephones? Mr. Anderson told me so; that some farmers actually make their fences into telephone lines, and that from that little hut over there you can speak to Montreal when you please? And just before I left London I was staying in a big country house, thirty miles from Hyde Park Corner, and you couldn't telephone to London except by driving five miles to the nearest town!"

"I wonder why that should strike you so much—the telephones, I mean?"

Delaine's tone was stiff. He had thrown himself back in his chair with folded arms, and a slight look of patience. "After all, you know, it may only be one dull person telephoning to another dull person—on subjects that don't matter!"

Elizabeth laughed and coloured.

"Oh! it isn't telephones in themselves. It's—" She hesitated, and began again, trying to express herself. "When one thinks of all the haphazard of history—how nations have tumbled up, or been dragged up, through centuries of blind horror and mistake, how wonderful to see a nation made consciously!—before your eyes—by science and intelligence—everything thought of, everything foreseen! First of all, this wonderful railway, driven across these deserts, against opposition, against unbelief, by a handful of men, who risked everything, and have—perhaps—changed the face of the world!"

She stopped smiling. In truth, her new capacity for dithyramb was no less surprising to herself than to Delaine.

"I return to my point"—he made it not without tartness—"will the new men be adequate to the new state?"

"Won't they?" He fancied a certain pride in her bearing. "They explained to me the other day at Winnipeg what the Government do for the emigrants—how they guide and help them—take care of them in sickness and in trouble, through the first years—protect them, really, even from themselves. And one thinks how Governments have taxed, and tortured, and robbed, and fleeced—Oh, surely, surely, the world improves!" She clasped her hands tightly on her knee, as though trying by the physical action to restrain the feeling within. "And to see here the actual foundations of a great state laid under your eyes, deep and strong, by men who know what it is they are doing—to see history begun on a blank page, by men who know what they are writing—isn't it wonderful, wonderful!"

"Dear lady!" said Delaine, smiling, "America has been dealing with emigrants for generations; and there are people who say that corruption is rife in Canada."

But Elizabeth would not be quenched.

"We come after America—we climb on her great shoulders to see the way. But is there anything in America to equal the suddenness of this? Twelve years ago even—in all this Northwest—practically nothing. And then God said: 'Let there be a nation!'—and there was a nation—in a night and a morning." She waved her hand towards the great expanse of prairie. "And as for corruption—"

"Well?" He waited maliciously.

"There is no great brew without a scum," she said laughing. "But find me a brew anywhere in the world, of such power, with so little."

"Mr. Anderson would, I think, be pleased with you," said Delaine, drily.

Elizabeth frowned a little.

"Do you think I learnt it from him? I assure you he never rhapsodises."

"No; but he gives you the material for rhapsodies."

"And why not?" said Elizabeth indignantly. "If he didn't love the country and believe in it he wouldn't be going into its public life. You can feel that he is Canadian through and through."

"A farmer's son, I think, from Manitoba?"

"Yes." Elizabeth's tone was a little defensive.

"Will you not sometimes—if you watch his career—regret that, with his ability, he has not the environment—and the audience—of the Old World?"

"No, never! He will be one of the shapers of the new."

Delaine looked at her with a certain passion.

"All very well, but you don't belong to it. We can't spare you from the old."

"Oh, as for me, I'm full of vicious and corrupt habits!" put in Elizabeth hurriedly. "I am not nearly good enough for the new!"

"Thank goodness for that!" said Delaine fervently, and, bending forward, he tried to see her face. But Elizabeth did not allow it. She could not help flushing; but as she bent over the side of the platform looking ahead, she announced in her gayest voice that there was a town to be seen, and it was probably Regina.

The station at Regina, when they steamed into it, was crowded with folk, and gay with flags. Anderson, after a conversation with the station-master, came to the car to say that the Governor-General, Lord Wrekin, who had been addressing a meeting at Regina, was expected immediately, to take the East-bound train; which was indeed already lying, with its steam up, on the further side of the station, the Viceregal car in its rear.

"But there are complications. Look there!"

He pointed to a procession coming along the platform. Six men bore a coffin covered with white flowers. Behind it came persons in black, a group of men, and one woman; then others, mostly young men, also in mourning, and bare-headed.

As the procession passed the car, Anderson and Delaine uncovered.

Elizabeth turned a questioning look on Anderson.

"A young man from Ontario," he explained, "quite a lad. He had come here out West to a farm—to work his way—a good, harmless little fellow—the son of a widow. A week ago a vicious horse kicked him in the stable. He died yesterday morning. They are taking him back to Ontario to be buried. The friends of his chapel subscribed to do it, and they brought his mother here to nurse him. She arrived just in time. That is she."

He pointed to the bowed figure, hidden in a long crape veil. Elizabeth's eyes filled.

"But it comes awkwardly," Anderson went on, looking back along the platform—"for the Governor-General is expected this very moment. The funeral ought to have been here half an hour ago. They seem to have been delayed. Ah! here he is!"

"Elizabeth!—his Excellency!" cried Philip, emerging from the car.

"Hush!" Elizabeth put her finger to her lip. The young man looked at the funeral procession in astonishment, which was just reaching the side of the empty van on the East-bound train which was waiting, with wide-open doors, to receive the body. The bearers let down the coffin gently to the ground, and stood waiting in hesitation. But there were no railway employes to help them. A flurried station-master and his staff were receiving the official party. Suddenly someone started the revival hymn, "Shall We Gather at the River?" It was taken up vigorously by the thirty or forty young men who had followed the coffin, and their voices, rising and falling in a familiar lilting melody, filled the station:

Yes, we'll gather at the river, The beautiful, beautiful river— Gather with the saints at the river, That flows by the throne of God!

Elizabeth looked towards the entrance of the station. A tall and slender man had just stepped on to the platform. It was the Governor-General, with a small staff behind him. The staff and the station officials stood hat in hand. A few English tourists from the West-bound train hurried up; the men uncovered, the ladies curtsied. A group of settlers' wives newly arrived from Minnesota, who were standing near the entrance, watched the arrival with curiosity. Lord Wrekin, seeing women in his path, saluted them; and they replied with a friendly and democratic nod. Then suddenly the Governor-General heard the singing, and perceived the black distant crowd. He inquired of the persons near him, and then passed on through the groups which had begun to gather round himself, raising his hand for silence. The passengers of the West-bound train had by now mostly descended, and pressed after him. Bare-headed, he stood behind the mourners while the hymn proceeded, and the coffin was lifted and placed in the car with the wreaths round it. The mother clung a moment to the side of the door, unconsciously resisting those who tried to lead her away. The kind grey eyes of the Governor-General rested upon her, but he made no effort to approach or speak to her. Only his stillness kept the crowd still.

Elizabeth at her window watched the scene—the tall figure of his Excellency—the bowed woman—the throng of officials and of mourners. Over the head of the Governor-General a couple of flags swelled in a light breeze—the Union Jack and the Maple Leaf; beyond the heads of the crowd there was a distant glimpse of the barracks of the Mounted Police; and then boundless prairie and floating cloud.

At last the mother yielded, and was led to the carriage behind the coffin. Gently, with bent head, Lord Wrekin made his way to her. But no one heard what passed between them. Then, silently, the funeral crowd dispersed, and another crowd—of officials and business men—claimed the Governor-General. Standing in its midst, he turned for a moment to scan the West-bound train.

"Ah, Lady Merton!" He had perceived the car and Elizabeth's face at the window, and he hastened across to speak to her. They were old friends in England, and they had already met in Ottawa.

"So I find you on your travels! Well?"

His look, gay and vivacious as a boy's, interrogated hers. Elizabeth stammered a few words in praise of Canada. But her eyes were still wet, and the Governor-General perceived it.

"That was touching?" he said. "To die in your teens in this country!—just as the curtain is up and the play begins—hard! Hullo, Anderson!"

The great man extended a cordial hand, chaffed Philip a little, gave Lady Merton some hurried but very precise directions as to what she was to see—and whom—at Vancouver and Pretoria. "You must see So-and-so and So-and-so—great friends of mine. D——'ll tell you all about the lumbering. Get somebody to show you the Chinese quarter. And there's a splendid old fellow—a C.P.R. man—did some of the prospecting for the railway up North, toward the Yellowhead. Never heard such tales; I could have sat up all night." He hastily scribbled a name on a card and gave it to Elizabeth. "Good-bye—good-bye!"

He hastened off, but they saw him standing a few moments longer on the platform, the centre of a group of provincial politicians, farmers, railway superintendents, and others—his hat on the back of his head, his pleasant laugh ringing every now and then above the clatter of talk. Then came departure, and at the last moment he jumped into his carriage, talking and talked to, almost till it had left the platform.

Anderson hailed a farming acquaintance.

"Well? What has the Governor-General been doing?"

"Speaking at a Farmers' Conference. Awful shindy yesterday!—between the farmers and the millers. Row about the elevators. The farmers want the Dominion to own 'em—vow they're cheated and bullied, and all the rest of it. Row about the railway, too. Shortage of cars; you know the old story. A regular wasp's nest, the whole thing! Well, the Governor-General came this morning, and everything's blown over! Can't remember what he said, but we're all sure somebody's going to do something. Hope you know how he does it!—I don't."

Anderson laughed as he sat down beside Elizabeth, and the train began to move.

"We seem to send you the right men!" she said, smiling—with a little English conceit that became her.

The train left the station. As it did so, an old man in the first emigrant car, who, during the wait at Regina, had appeared to be asleep in a corner, with a battered slouch hat drawn down over his eyes and face, stealthily moved to the window, and looked back upon the now empty platform.

Some hours later Anderson was still sitting beside Elizabeth. They were in Southern Alberta. The June day had darkened. And for the first time Elizabeth felt the chill and loneliness of the prairies, where as yet she had only felt their exhilaration. A fierce wind was sweeping over the boundless land, with showers in its train. The signs of habitation became scantier, the farms fewer. Bunches of horses and herds of cattle widely scattered over the endless grassy plains—the brown lines of the ploughed fire-guards running beside the railway—the bents of winter grass, white in the storm-light, bleaching the rolling surface of the ground, till the darkness of some cloud-shadow absorbed them; these things breathed—of a sudden—wildness and desolation. It seemed as though man could no longer cope with the mere vastness of the earth—an earth without rivers or trees, too visibly naked and measureless.

"At last I am afraid of it!" said Elizabeth, shivering in her fur coat, with a little motion of her hand toward the plain. "And what must it be in winter!"

Anderson laughed.

"The winter is much milder here than in Manitoba! Radiant sunshine day after day—and the warm chinook-wind. And it is precisely here that the railway lands are selling at a higher price for the moment than anywhere else, and that settlers are rushing in. Look there!"

Elizabeth peered through the gloom, and saw the gleam of water. The train ran along beside it for a minute or two, then the gathering darkness seemed to swallow it up.

"A river?"

"No, a canal, fed from the Bow River—far ahead of us. We are in the irrigation belt—and in the next few years thousands of people will settle here. Give the land water—the wheat follows! South and North, even now, the wheat is spreading and driving out the ranchers. Irrigation is the secret. We are mastering it! And you thought"—he looked at her with amusement and a kind of triumph—"that the country had mastered us?"

There was something in his voice and eyes, as though not he spoke, but a nation through him. "Splendid!" was the word that rose in Elizabeth's mind; and a thrill ran with it.

The gloom of the afternoon deepened. The showers increased. But Elizabeth could not be prevailed upon to go in. In the car Delaine and Philip were playing dominoes, in despair of anything more amusing. Yerkes was giving his great mind to the dinner which was to be the consolation of Philip's day.

Meanwhile Elizabeth kept Anderson talking. That was her great gift. She was the best of listeners. Thus led on he could not help himself, any more than he had been able to help himself on the afternoon of the sink-hole. He had meant to hold himself strictly in hand with this too attractive Englishwoman. On the contrary, he had never yet poured out so frankly to mortal ear the inmost dreams and hopes which fill the ablest minds of Canada—dreams half imagination, half science; and hopes which, yesterday romance, become reality to-morrow.

He showed her, for instance, the great Government farms as they passed them, standing white and trim upon the prairie, and bade her think of the busy brains at work there—magicians conjuring new wheats that will ripen before the earliest frosts, and so draw onward the warm tide of human life over vast regions now desolate; or trees that will stand firm against the prairie winds, and in the centuries to come turn this bare and boundless earth, this sea-floor of a primeval ocean, which is now Western Canada, into a garden of the Lord. Or from the epic of the soil, he would slip on to the human epic bound up with it—tale after tale of life in the ranching country, and of the emigration now pouring into Alberta—witched out of him by this delicately eager face, these lovely listening eyes. And here, in spite of his blunt, simple speech, came out the deeper notes of feeling, feeling richly steeped in those "mortal things"—earthy, tender, humorous, or terrible—which make up human fate.

Had he talked like this to the Catholic girl in Quebec? And yet she had renounced him? She had never loved him, of course! To love this man would be to cleave to him.

Once, in a lifting of the shadows of the prairie, Elizabeth saw a group of antelope standing only a few hundred yards from the train, tranquilly indifferent, their branching horns clear in a pallid ray of light; and once a prairie-wolf, solitary and motionless; and once, as the train moved off after a stoppage, an old badger leisurely shambling off the line itself. And once, too, amid a driving storm-shower, and what seemed to her unbroken formless solitudes, suddenly, a tent by the railway side, and the blaze of a fire; and as the train slowly passed, three men—lads rather—emerging to laugh and beckon to it. The tent, the fire, the gay challenge of the young faces and the English voices, ringed by darkness and wild weather, brought the tears back to Elizabeth's eyes, she scarcely knew why.

"Settlers, in their first year," said Anderson, smiling, as he waved back again.

But, to Elizabeth, it seemed a parable of the new Canada.

An hour later, amid a lightening of the clouds over the West, that spread a watery gold over the prairie, Anderson sprang to his feet.

"The Rockies!"

And there, a hundred miles away, peering over the edge of the land, ran from north to south a vast chain of snow peaks, and Elizabeth saw at last that even the prairies have an end.

The car was shunted at Calgary, in order that its occupants might enjoy a peaceful night. When she found herself alone in her tiny room, Elizabeth stood for a while before her reflection in the glass. Her eyes were frowning and distressed; her cheeks glowed. Arthur Delaine, her old friend, had bade her a cold good night, and she knew well enough that—from him—she deserved it. "Yet I gave him the whole morning," she pleaded with herself. "I did my best. But oh, why, why did I ever let him come!"

And even in the comparative quiet of the car at rest, she could not sleep; so quickened were all her pulses, and so vivid the memories of the day.



CHAPTER VI

Arthur Delaine was strolling and smoking on the broad wooden balcony, which in the rear of the hotel at Banff overlooks a wide scene of alp and water. The splendid Bow River comes swirling past the hotel, on its rush from the high mountains to the plains of Saskatchewan. Craggy mountains drop almost to the river's edge on one side; on the other, pine woods mask the railway and the hills; while in the distance shine the snow-peaks of the Rockies. It is the gateway of the mountains, fair and widely spaced, as becomes their dignity.

Delaine, however, was not observing the scenery. He was entirely absorbed by reflection on his own affairs. The party had now been stationary for three or four days at Banff, enjoying the comforts of hotel life. The travelling companion on whom Delaine had not calculated in joining Lady Merton and her brother—Mr. George Anderson—had taken his leave, temporarily, at Calgary. In thirty-six hours, however, he had reappeared. It seemed that the construction work in which he was engaged in the C—— valley did not urgently require his presence; that his position towards the railway, with which he was about to sever his official connection, was one of great freedom and influence, owing, no doubt, to the services he had been able to render it the year before. He was, in fact, master of his time, and meant to spend it apparently in making Lady Merton's tour agreeable.

For himself, Delaine could only feel that the advent of this stranger had spoilt the whole situation. It seemed now as though Elizabeth and her brother could not get on without him. As he leant over the railing of the balcony, Delaine could see far below, in the wood, the flutter of a white dress. It belonged to Lady Merton, and the man beside her was George Anderson. He had been arranging their walks and expeditions for the last four days, and was now about to accompany the English travellers on a special journey with a special engine through the Kicking Horse Pass and back, a pleasure suggested by the kindness of the railway authorities.

It was true that he had at one time been actively engaged on the important engineering work now in progress in the pass; and Lady Merton could not, therefore, have found a better showman. But why any showman at all? What did she know about this man who had sprung so rapidly into intimacy with herself and her brother? Yet Delaine could not honestly accuse him of presuming on a chance acquaintance, since it was not to be denied that it was Philip Gaddesden himself, who had taken an invalid's capricious liking to the tall, fair-haired fellow, and had urgently requested—almost forced him to come back to them.

Delaine was not a little bruised in spirit, and beginning to be angry. During the solitary day he had been alone with them Elizabeth had been kindness and complaisance itself. But instead of that closer acquaintance, that opportunity for a gradual and delightful courtship on which he had reckoned, when the restraint of watching eyes and neighbourly tongues should be removed, he was conscious that he had never been so remote from her during the preceding winter at home, as he was now that he had journeyed six thousand miles simply and solely on the chance of proposing to her. He could not understand how anything so disastrous, and apparently so final, could have happened to him in one short week! Lady Merton—he saw quite plainly—did not mean him to propose to her, if she could possibly avoid it. She kept Philip with her, and gave no opportunities. And always, as before, she was possessed and bewitched by Canada! Moreover, the Chief Justice and the French Canadian, Mariette, had turned up at the hotel two days before, on their way to Vancouver. Elizabeth had been sitting, figuratively, at the feet of both of them ever since; and both had accepted an invitation to join in the Kicking Horse party, and were delaying their journey West accordingly.

Instead of solitude, therefore, Delaine was aware of a most troublesome amount of society. Aware also, deep down, that some test he resented but could not escape had been applied to him on this journey, by fortune—and Elizabeth!—and that he was not standing it well. And the worst of it was that as his discouragement in the matter of Lady Merton increased, so also did his distaste for this raw, new country, without associations, without art, without antiquities, in which he should never, never have chosen to spend one of his summers of this short life, but for the charms of Elizabeth! And the more boredom he was conscious of, the less congenial and sympathetic, naturally, did he become as a companion for Lady Merton. Of this he was dismally aware. Well! he hoped, bitterly, that she knew what she was about, and could take care of herself. This man she had made friends with was good-looking and, by his record, possessed ability. He had fairly gentlemanly manners, also; though, in Delaine's opinion, he was too self-confident on his own account, and too boastful on Canada's, But he was a man of humble origin, son of a farmer who seemed, by the way, to be dead; and grandson, so Delaine had heard him say, through his mother, of one of the Selkirk settlers of 1812—no doubt of some Scotch gillie or shepherd. Such a person, in England, would have no claim whatever to the intimate society of Elizabeth Merton. Yet here she was alone, really without protection—for what use was this young, scatter-brained brother?—herself only twenty-seven, and so charming? so much prettier than she had ever seemed to be at home. It was a dangerous situation—a situation to which she ought not to have been exposed. Delaine had always believed her sensitive and fastidious; and in his belief all women should be sensitive and fastidious, especially as to who are, and who are not, their social equals. But it was clear he had not quite understood her. And this man whom they had picked up was undoubtedly handsome, strong and masterful, of the kind that the natural woman admires. But then he—Delaine—had never thought of Elizabeth Merton as the natural woman. There lay the disappointment.

What was his own course to be? He believed himself defeated, but to show any angry consciousness of it would be to make life very uncomfortable in future, seeing that he and the Gaddesdens were inevitably neighbours and old friends. After all, he had not committed himself beyond repair. Why not resume the friendly relation which had meant so much to him before other ideas had entered in? Ah! it was no longer easy. The distress of which he was conscious had some deep roots. He must marry—the estate demanded it. But his temperament was invincibly cautious; his mind moved slowly. How was he to begin upon any fresh quest? His quiet pursuit of Elizabeth had come about naturally and by degrees. Propinquity had done it. And now that his hopes were dashed, he could not imagine how he was to find any other chance; for, as a rule, he was timid and hesitating with women. As he hung, in his depression, over the river, this man of forty envisaged—suddenly and not so far away—old age and loneliness. A keen and peevish resentment took possession of him.

Lady Merton and Anderson began to ascend a long flight of steps leading from the garden path below to the balcony where Delaine stood. Elizabeth waved to him with smiles, and he must perforce watch her as she mounted side by side with the fair-haired Canadian.

"Oh! such delightful plans!" she said, as she sank out of breath into a seat. "We have ordered the engine for two o'clock. Please observe, Mr. Arthur. Never again in this mortal life shall I be able to 'order' an engine for two o'clock!—and one of these C.P.R. engines, too, great splendid fellows! We go down the pass, and take tea at Field; and come up the pass again this evening, to dine and sleep at Laggan. As we descend, the engine goes in front to hold us back; and when we ascend, it goes behind to push us up; and I understand that the hill is even steeper"—she bent forward, laughing, to Delaine, appealing to their common North Country recollections—"than the Shap incline!"

"Too steep, I gather," said Delaine, "to be altogether safe." His tone was sharp. He stood with his back to the view, looking from Elizabeth to her companion.

Anderson turned.

"As we manage it, it is perfectly safe! But it costs us too much to make it safe. That's the reason for the new bit of line."

Elizabeth turned away uncomfortably, conscious again, as she had often been before, of the jarring between the two men.

At two o'clock the car and the engine were ready, and Yerkes received them at the station beaming with smiles. According to him, the privilege allowed them was all his doing, and he was exceedingly jealous of any claim of Anderson's in the matter.

"You come to me, my lady, if you want anything. Last year I ran a Russian princess through—official. 'You take care of the Grand Duchess, Yerkes,' they says to me at Montreal; for they know there isn't anybody on the line they can trust with a lady as they can me. Of course, I couldn't help her faintin' at the high bridges, going up Rogers Pass; that wasn't none of my fault!"

"Faint—at bridges!" said Elizabeth with scorn. "I never heard of anybody doing such a thing, Yerkes."

"Ah! you wait till you see 'em, my lady," said Yerkes, grinning.

The day was radiant, and even Philip, as they started from Banff station, was in a Canadian mood. So far he had been quite cheerful and good-tempered, though not, to Elizabeth's anxious eye, much more robust yet than when they had left England. He smoked far too much, and Elizabeth wished devoutly that Yerkes would not supply him so liberally with whisky and champagne. But Philip was not easily controlled. The very decided fancy, however, which he had lately taken for George Anderson had enabled Elizabeth, in one or two instances, to manage him more effectively. The night they arrived at Calgary, the lad had had a wild desire to go off on a moonlight drive across the prairies to a ranch worked by an old Cambridge friend of his. The night was cold, and he was evidently tired by the long journey from Winnipeg. Elizabeth was in despair, but could not move him at all. Then Anderson had intervened; had found somehow and somewhere a trapper just in from the mountains with a wonderful "catch" of fox and marten; and in the amusement of turning over a bundle of magnificent furs, and of buying something straight from the hunter for his mother, the youth had forgotten his waywardness. Behind his back, Elizabeth had warmly thanked her lieutenant.

"He only wanted a little distraction," Anderson had said, with a shy smile, as though he both liked and disliked her thanks. And then, impulsively, she had told him a good deal about Philip and his illness, and their mother, and the old house in Cumberland. She, of all persons, to be so communicative about the family affairs to a stranger! Was it that two days in a private car in Canada went as far as a month's acquaintance elsewhere?

Another passenger had been introduced to Lady Merton by Anderson, an hour before the departure of the car, and had made such a pleasant impression on her that he also had been asked to join the party, and had very gladly consented. This was the American, Mr. Val Morton, now the official receiver, so Elizabeth understood, of a great railway system in the middle west of the United States. The railway had been handed over to him in a bankrupt condition. His energy and probity were engaged in pulling it through. More connections between it and the Albertan railways were required; and he was in Canada looking round and negotiating. He was already known to the Chief Justice and Mariette, and Elizabeth fell quickly in love with his white hair, his black eyes, his rapier-like slenderness and keenness, and that pleasant mingling in him—so common in the men of his race—of the dry shrewdness of the financier with a kind of headlong courtesy to women.

On sped the car through the gate of the Rockies. The mountains grew deeper, the snows deeper against the blue, the air more dazzling, the forests closer, breathing balm into the sunshine.

Suddenly the car slackened and stopped. No sign of a station. Only a rustic archway, on which was written "The Great Divide," and beneath the archway two small brooklets issuing, one flowing to the right, the other to the left.

They all left the car and stood round the tiny streams. They were on the watershed. The water in the one streamlet flowed to the Atlantic, that in its fellow to the Pacific.

Eternal parable of small beginnings and vast fates! But in this setting of untrodden mountains, and beside this railway which now for a few short years had been running its parlour and dining cars, its telegraphs and electric lights and hotels, a winding thread of life and civilisation, through the lonely and savage splendours of snow-peak and rock, transforming day by day the destinies of Canada—the parable became a truth, proved upon the pulses of men.

The party sat down on the grass beside the bright, rippling water, and Yerkes brought them coffee. While they were taking it, the two engine-drivers descended from the cab of the engine and began to gather a few flowers and twigs from spring bushes that grew near. They put them together and offered them to Lady Merton. She, going to speak to them, found that they were English and North Country.

"Philip!—Mr. Arthur!—they come from our side of Carlisle!"

Philip looked up with a careless nod and smile. Delaine rose and went to join her. A lively conversation sprang up between her and the two men. They were, it seemed, a stalwart pair of friends, kinsmen indeed, who generally worked together, and were now entrusted with some of the most important work on the most difficult sections of the line. But they were not going to spend all their days on the line—not they! Like everybody in the West, they had their eyes on the land. Upon a particular district of it, moreover, in Northern Alberta, not yet surveyed or settled. But they were watching it, and as soon as the "steel gang" of a projected railway came within measurable distance they meant to claim their sections and work their land together.

When the conversation came to an end and Elizabeth, who with her companions had been strolling along the line a little in front of the train, turned back towards her party, Delaine looked down upon her, at once anxious to strike the right note, and moodily despondent of doing it.

"Evidently, two very good fellows!" he said in his rich, ponderous voice. "You gave them a great pleasure by going to talk to them."

"I?" cried Elizabeth. "They are a perfect pair of gentlemen!—and it is very kind of them to drive us!"

Delaine laughed uneasily.

"The gradations here are bewildering—or rather the absence of gradations."

"One gets down to the real thing," said Elizabeth, rather hotly.

Delaine laughed again, with a touch of bitterness.

"The real thing? What kind of reality? There are all sorts."

Elizabeth was suddenly conscious of a soreness in his tone. She tried to walk warily.

"I was only thinking," she protested, "of the chances a man gets in this country of showing what is in him."

"Remember, too," said Delaine, with spirit, "the chances that he misses!"

"The chances that belong only to the old countries? I am rather bored with them!" said Elizabeth flippantly.

Delaine forced a smile.

"Poor Old World! I wonder if you will ever be fair to it again, or—or to the people bound up with it!"

She looked at him, a little discomposed, and said, smiling:

"Wait till you meet me next in Rome!"

"Shall I ever meet you again in Rome?" he replied, under his breath, as though involuntarily.

As he spoke he made a determined pause, a stone's throw from the rippling stream that marks the watershed; and Elizabeth must needs pause with him. Beyond the stream, Philip sat lounging among rugs and cushions brought from the car, Anderson and the American beside him. Anderson's fair, uncovered head and broad shoulders were strongly thrown out against the glistening snows of the background. Upon the three typical figures—the frail English boy—the Canadian—the spare New Yorker—there shone an indescribable brilliance of light. The energy of the mountain sunshine and the mountain air seemed to throb and quiver through the persons talking—through Anderson's face, and his eyes fixed upon Elizabeth—through the sunlit water—the sparkling grasses—the shimmering spectacle of mountain and summer cloud that begirt them.

"Dear Mr. Arthur, of course we shall meet again in Rome!" said Elizabeth, rosy, and not knowing in truth what to say. "This place has turned my head a little!"—she looked round her, raising her hand to the spectacle as though in pretty appeal to him to share her own exhilaration—"but it will be all over so soon—and you know I don't forget old friends—or old pleasures."

Her voice wavered a little. He looked at her, with parted lips, and a rather hostile, heated expression; then drew back, alarmed at his own temerity.

"Of course I know it! You must forgive a bookworm his grumble. Shall I help you over the stream?"

But she stepped across the tiny streamlet without giving him her hand.

As they later rejoined the party, Morton, the Chief Justice, and Mariette returned from a saunter in the course of which they too had been chatting to the engine-drivers.

"I know the part of the country those men want," the American was saying. "I was all over Alberta last fall—part of it in a motor car. We jumped about those stubble-fields in a way to make a leopard jealous! Every bone in my body was sore for weeks afterwards. But it was worth while. That's a country!"—he threw up his hands. "I was at Edmonton on the day when the last Government lands, the odd numbers, were thrown open. I saw the siege of the land offices, the rush of the new population. Ah, well, of course, we're used to such scenes in the States. There's a great trek going on now in our own Southwest. But when that's over, our free land is done. Canada will have the handling of the last batch on this planet."

"If Canada by that time is not America," said Mariette, drily.

The American digested the remark.

"Well," he said, at last, with a smile, "if I were a Canadian, perhaps I should be a bit nervous."

Thereupon, Mariette with great animation developed his theme of the "American invasion." Winnipeg was one danger spot, British Columbia another. The "peaceful penetration," both of men and capital, was going on so rapidly that a movement for annexation, were it once started in certain districts of Canada, might be irresistible. The harsh and powerful face of the speaker became transfigured; one divined in him some hidden motive which was driving him to contest and belittle the main currents and sympathies about him. He spoke as a prophet, but the faith which envenomed the prophecy lay far out of sight.

Anderson took it quietly. The Chief Justice smiled.

"It might have been," he said, "it might have been! This railroad has made the difference." He stretched out his hand towards the line and the pass. "Twenty years ago, I came over this ground with the first party that ever pushed through Rogers Pass and down the Illecillewaet Valley to the Pacific. We camped just about here for the night. And in the evening I was sitting by myself on the slopes of that mountain opposite"—he raised his hand—"looking at the railway camps below me, and the first rough line that had been cut through the forests. And I thought of the day when the trains would be going backwards and forwards, and these nameless valleys and peaks would become the playground of Canada and America. But what I didn't see was the shade of England looking on!—England, whose greater destiny was being decided by those gangs of workmen below me, and the thousands of workmen behind me, busy night and day in bridging the gap between east and west. Traffic from north and south"—he turned towards the American—"that meant, for your Northwest, fusion with our Northwest; traffic from east to west—that meant England, and the English Sisterhood of States! And that, for the moment, I didn't see."

"Shall I quote you something I found in an Edmonton paper the other day?" said Anderson, raising his head from where he lay, looking down into the grass. And with his smiling, intent gaze fixed on the American, he recited:

Land of the sweeping eagle, your goal is not our goal! For the ages have taught that the North and the South breed difference of soul. We toiled for years in the snow and the night, because we believed in the spring, And the mother who cheered us first, shall be first at the banquetting! The grey old mother, the dear old mother, who taught us the note we sing!

The American laughed.

"A bit raw, like some of your prairie towns; but it hits the nail. I dare say we have missed our bargain. What matter! Our own chunk is as big as we can chew."

There was a moment's silence. Elizabeth's eyes were shining; even Philip sat open-mouthed and dumb, staring at Anderson.

In the background Delaine waited, grudgingly expectant, for the turn of Elizabeth's head, and the spark of consciousness passing between the two faces which he had learnt to watch. It came—a flash of some high sympathy—involuntary, lasting but a moment. Then Mariette threw out:

"And in the end, what are you going to make of it? A replica of Europe, or America?—a money-grubbing civilisation with no faith but the dollar? If so, we shall have had the great chance of history—and lost it!"

"We shan't lose it," said Anderson, "unless the gods mock us."

"Why not?" said Mariette sombrely. "Nations have gone mad before now."

"Ah!—prophesy, prophesy!" said the Chief Justice sadly. "All very well for you young men, but for us, who are passing away! Here we are at the birth. Shall we never, in any state of being, know the end? I have never felt so bitterly as I do now the limitations of our knowledge and our life."

No one answered him. But Elizabeth looking up saw the aspect of Mariette—the aspect of a thinker and a mystic—slowly relax. Its harshness became serenity, its bitterness peace. And with her quick feeling she guessed that the lament of the Chief Justice had only awakened in the religious mind the typical religious cry, "Thou, Lord, art the Eternal, and Thy years shall not fail."

At Field, where a most friendly inn shelters under the great shoulders of Mount Stephen, they left the car a while, took tea in the hotel, and wandered through the woods below it. All the afternoon, Elizabeth had shown a most delicate and friendly consideration for Delaine. She had turned the conversation often in his direction and on his subjects, had placed him by her side at tea, and in general had more than done her duty by him. To no purpose. Delaine saw himself as the condemned man to whom indulgences are granted before execution. She would probably have done none of these things if there had been any real chance for him.

But in the walk after tea, Anderson and Lady Merton drifted together. There had been so far a curious effort on both their parts to avoid each other's company. But now the Chief Justice and Delaine had foregathered; Philip was lounging and smoking on the balcony of the hotel with a visitor there, an old Etonian fishing and climbing in the Rockies for health, whom they had chanced upon at tea. Mariette, after one glance at the company, especially at Elizabeth and Anderson, had turned aside into the woods by himself.

They crossed the river and strolled up the road to Emerald Lake. Over the superb valley to their left hung the great snowy mass, glistening and sunlit, of Mount Stephen; far to the West the jagged peaks of the Van Home range shot up into the golden air; on the flat beside the river vivid patches of some crimson flower, new to Elizabeth's eyes, caught the sloping light; and the voice of a swollen river pursued them.

They began to talk, this time of England. Anderson asked many questions as to English politics and personalities. And she, to please him, chattered of great people and events, of scenes and leaders in Parliament, of diplomats and royalties; all the gossip of the moment, in fact, fluttering round the principal figures of English and European politics. It was the talk most natural to her; the talk of the world she knew best; and as Elizabeth was full of shrewdness and natural salt, without a trace of malice, no more at least than a woman should have—to borrow the saying about Wilkes and his squint—her chatter was generally in request, and she knew it.

But Anderson, though he had led up to it, did not apparently enjoy it; on the contrary, she felt him gradually withdrawing and cooling, becoming a little dry and caustic, even satirical, as on the first afternoon of their acquaintance. So that after a while her gossip flagged; since the game wants two to play it. Then Anderson walked on with a furrowed brow, and raised colour; and she could not imagine what had been done or said to annoy him.

She could only try to lead him back to Canada. But she got little or no response.

"Our politics must seem to you splashes in a water-butt," he said impatiently, "after London and Europe."

"A pretty big water-butt!"

"Size makes no difference." Elizabeth's lips twitched as she remembered Arthur Delaine's similar protests; but she kept her countenance, and merely worked the harder to pull her companion out of this odd pit of ill-humour into which he had fallen. And in the end she succeeded; he repented, and let her manage him as she would. And whether it was the influence of this hidden action and reaction between their minds, or of the perfumed June day breathing on them from the pines, or of the giant splendour of Mount Burgess, rising sheer in front of them out of the dark avenue of the forest, cannot be told; but, at least, they became more intimate than they had yet been, more deeply interesting each to the other. In his thoughts and ideals she found increasing fascination; her curiosity, her friendly and womanly curiosity, grew with satisfaction. His view of life was often harsh or melancholy; but there was never a false nor a mean note.

Yet before the walk was done he had startled her. As they turned back towards Field, and were in the shadows of the pines, he said, with abrupt decision:

"Will you forgive me if I say something?"

She looked up surprised.

"Don't let your brother drink so much champagne!"

The colour rushed into Elizabeth's face. She drew herself up, conscious of sharp pain, but also of anger. A stranger, who had not yet known them ten days! But she met an expression on his face, timid and yet passionately resolved, which arrested her.

"I really don't know what you mean, Mr. Anderson!" she said proudly.

"I thought I had seen you anxious. I should be anxious if I were you," he went on hurriedly. "He has been ill, and is not quite master of himself. That is always the critical moment. He is a charming fellow—you must be devoted to him. For God's sake, don't let him ruin himself body and soul!"

Elizabeth was dumbfounded. The tears rushed into her eyes, her voice choked in her throat. She must, she would defend her brother. Then she thought of the dinner of the night before, and the night before that—of the wine bill at Winnipeg and Toronto. Her colour faded away; her heart sank; but it still seemed to her an outrage that he should have dared to speak of it. He spoke, however, before she could.

"Forgive me," he said, recovering his self-control. "I know it must seem mere insolence on my part. But I can't help it—I can't look on at such a thing, silently. May I explain? Please permit me! I told you"—his voice changed—"my mother and sisters had been burnt to death. I adored my mother. She was everything to me. She brought us up with infinite courage, though she was a very frail woman. In those days a farm in Manitoba was a much harder struggle than it is now. Yet she never complained; she was always cheerful; always at work. But—my father drank! It came upon him as a young man—after an illness. It got worse as he grew older. Every bit of prosperity that came to us, he drank away; he would have ruined us again and again, but for my mother. And at last he murdered her—her and my poor sisters!"

Elizabeth made a sound of horror.

"Oh, there was no intention to murder," said Anderson bitterly. "He merely sat up drinking one winter night with a couple of whisky bottles beside him. Then in the morning he was awakened by the cold; the fire had gone out. He stumbled out to get the can of coal-oil from the stable, still dazed with drink, brought it in and poured some on the wood. Some more wood was wanted. He went out to fetch it, leaving his candle alight, a broken end in a rickety candlestick, on the floor beside the coal-oil. When he got to the stable it was warm and comfortable; he forgot what he had come for, fell down on a bundle of straw, and went into a dead sleep. The candle must have fallen over into the oil, the oil exploded, and in a few seconds the wooden house was in flames. By the time I came rushing back from the slough where I had been breaking the ice for water, the roof had already fallen in. My poor mother and two of the children had evidently tried to escape by the stairway and had perished there; the two others were burnt in their beds."

"And your father?" murmured Elizabeth, unable to take her eyes from the speaker.

"I woke him in the stable, and told him what had happened. Bit by bit I got out of him what he'd done. And then I said to him, 'Now choose!—either you go, or we. After the funeral, the boys and I have done with you. You can't force us to go on living with you. We will kill ourselves first. Either you stay here, and we go into Winnipeg; or you can sell the stock, take the money, and go. We'll work the farm.' He swore at me, but I told him he'd find we'd made up our minds. And a week later, he disappeared. He had sold the stock, and left us the burnt walls and the land."

"And you've never seen him since?"

"Never."

"You believe him dead?"

"I know that he died—in the first Yukon rush of ten years ago. I tracked him there, shortly afterwards. He was probably killed in a scuffle with some miners as drunken as himself."

There was a silence, which he broke very humbly.

"Do you forgive me? I know I am not sane on this point. I believe I have spoilt your day."

She looked up, her eyes swimming in tears, and held out her hand.

"It's nothing, you know," she said, trying to smile—"in our case. Philip is such a baby."

"I know; but look after him!" he said earnestly, as he grasped it.

The trees thinned, and voices approached. They emerged from the forest, and found themselves hailed by the Chief Justice.

The journey up the pass was even more wonderful than the journey down. Sunset lights lay on the forests, on the glorious lonely mountains, and on the valley of the Yoho, roadless and houseless now, but soon to be as famous through the world as Grindelwald or Chamounix. They dismounted and explored the great camps of workmen in the pass; they watched the boiling of the stream, which had carved the path of the railway; they gathered white dogwood, and yellow snow-lilies, and red painter's-brush.

Elizabeth and Anderson hardly spoke to each other. She talked a great deal with Delaine, and Mariette held a somewhat acid dispute with her on modern French books—Loti, Anatole France, Zola—authors whom his soul loathed.

But the day had forged a lasting bond between Anderson and Elizabeth, and they knew it.

* * * * *

The night rose clear and cold, with stars shining on the snow. Delaine, who with Anderson had found quarters in one of Laggan's handful of houses, went out to stroll and smoke alone, before turning into bed. He walked along the railway line towards Banff, in bitterness of soul, debating with himself whether he could possibly leave the party at once.

When he was well out of sight of the station and the houses, he became aware of a man persistently following him, and not without a hasty grip on the stout stick he carried, he turned at last to confront him.

"What do you want with me? You seem to be following me."

"Are you Mr. Arthur Delaine?" said a thick voice.

"That is my name. What do you want?"

"And you be lodging to-night in the same house with Mr. George Anderson?"

"I am. What's that to you?"

"Well, I want twenty minutes' talk with you," said the voice, after a pause. The accent was Scotch. In the darkness Delaine dimly perceived an old and bent man standing before him, who seemed to sway and totter as he leant upon his stick.

"I cannot imagine, sir, why you should want anything of the kind." And he turned to pursue his walk. The old man kept up with him, and presently said something which brought Delaine to a sudden stop of astonishment. He stood there listening for a few minutes, transfixed, and finally, turning round, he allowed his strange companion to walk slowly beside him back to Laggan.



CHAPTER VII

Oh! the freshness of the morning on Lake Louise!

It was barely eight o'clock, yet Elizabeth Merton had already taken her coffee on the hotel verandah, and was out wandering by herself. The hotel, which is nearly six thousand feet above the sea, had only just been opened for its summer guests, and Elizabeth and her party were its first inmates. Anderson indeed had arranged their coming, and was to have brought them hither himself. But on the night of the party's return to Laggan he had been hastily summoned by telegraph to a consultation of engineers on a difficult matter of railway grading in the Kootenay district. Delaine, knocking at his door in the morning, had found him flown. A note for Lady Merton explained his flight, gave all directions for the drive to Lake Louise, and expressed his hope to be with them again as expeditiously as possible. Three days had now elapsed since he had left them. Delaine, rather to Elizabeth's astonishment, had once or twice inquired when he might be expected to return.

Elizabeth found a little path by the lake shore, and pursued it a short way; but presently the splendour and the beauty overpowered her; her feet paused of themselves. She sat down on a jutting promontory of rock, and lost herself in the forms and hues of the morning. In front of her rose a wall of glacier sheer out of the water and thousands of feet above the lake, into the clear brilliance of the sky. On either side of its dazzling whiteness, mountains of rose-coloured rock, fledged with pine, fell steeply to the water's edge, enclosing and holding up the glacier; and vast rock pinnacles of a paler rose, melting into gold, broke, here and there, the gleaming splendour of the ice. The sun, just topping the great basin, kindled the ice surfaces, and all the glistening pinks and yellows, the pale purples and blood-crimsons of the rocks, to flame and splendour; while the shadows of the coolest azure still held the hollows and caves of the glacier. Deep in the motionless lake, the shining snows repeated themselves, so also the rose-red rocks, the blue shadows, the dark buttressing crags with their pines. Height beyond height, glory beyond glory—from the reality above, the eye descended to its lovelier image below, which lay there, enchanted and insubstantial, Nature's dream of itself.

The sky was pure light; the air pure fragrance. Heavy dews dripped from the pines and the moss, and sparkled in the sun. Beside Elizabeth, under a group of pines, lay a bed of snow-lilies, their golden heads dew-drenched, waiting for the touch of the morning, waiting, too—so she thought—for that Canadian poet who will yet place them in English verse beside the daffodils of Westmoreland.

She could hardly breathe for delight. The Alps, whether in their Swiss or Italian aspects, were dear and familiar to her. She climbed nimbly and well; and her senses knew the magic of high places. But never surely had even travelled eyes beheld a nobler fantasy of Nature than that composed by these snows and forests of Lake Louise; such rocks of opal and pearl; such dark gradations of splendour in calm water; such balanced intricacy and harmony in the building of this ice-palace that reared its majesty above the lake; such a beauty of subordinate and converging outline in the supporting mountains on either hand; as though the Earth Spirit had lingered on his work, finishing and caressing it in conscious joy.

And in Elizabeth's heart, too, there was a freshness of spring; an overflow of something elemental and irresistible.

Yet, strangely enough, it was at that moment expressing itself in regret and compunction. Since the dawn, that morning, she had been unable to sleep. The strong light, the pricking air, had kept her wakeful; and she had been employing her time in writing to her mother, who was also her friend.

"... Dear little mother—You will say I have been unkind—I say it to myself. But would it really have been fairer if I had forbidden him to join us? There was just a chance—it seems ridiculous now—but there was—I confess it! And by my letter from Toronto—though really my little note might have been written to anybody—I as good as said so to him, 'Come and throw the dice and—let us see what falls out!' Practically, that is what it amounted to—I admit it in sackcloth and ashes. Well!—we have thrown the dice—and it won't do! No, it won't, it won't do! And it is somehow all my fault—which is abominable. But I see now, what I never saw at home or in Italy, that he is a thousand years older than I—that I should weary and jar upon him at every turn, were I to marry him. Also I have discovered—out here—I believe, darling, you have known it all along!—that there is at the very root of me a kind of savage—a creature that hates fish-knives and finger-glasses and dressing for dinner—the things I have done all my life, and Arthur Delaine will go on doing all his. Also that I never want to see a museum again—at least, not for a long time; and that I don't care twopence whether Herculaneum is excavated or not!

"Isn't it shocking? I can't explain myself; and poor Mr. Arthur evidently can't make head or tail of me, and thinks me a little mad. So I am, in a sense. I am suffering from a new kind of folie des grandeurs. The world has suddenly grown so big; everything in the human story—all its simple fundamental things at least—is writ so large here. Hope and ambition—love and courage—the man wrestling with the earth—the woman who bears and brings up children—it is as though I had never felt, never seen them before. They rise out of the dust and mist of our modern life—great shapes warm from the breast of Nature—and I hold my breath. Behind them, for landscape, all the dumb age-long past of these plains and mountains; and in front, the future on the loom, and the young radiant nation, shuttle in hand, moving to and fro at her unfolding task!

"How unfair to Mr. Arthur that this queer intoxication of mine should have altered him so in my foolish eyes—as though one had scrubbed all the golden varnish from an old picture, and left it crude and charmless. It is not his fault—is mine. In Europe we loved the same things; his pleasure kindled mine. But here he enjoys nothing that I enjoy; he is longing for a tiresome day to end, when my heart is just singing for delight. For it is not only Canada in the large that holds me, but all its dear, human, dusty, incoherent detail—all its clatter of new towns and spreading farms—of pushing railways and young parliaments—of roadmaking and bridgemaking—of saw-mills and lumber camps—detail so different from anything I have ever discussed with Arthur Delaine before. Some of it is ugly, I know—I don't care! It is like a Rembrandt ugliness—that only helps and ministers to a stronger beauty, the beauty of prairie and sky, and the beauty of the human battle, the battle of blood and brain, with the earth and her forces.

"'Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare!'"

"There is a man here—a Mr. George Anderson, of whom I told you something in my last letter—who seems to embody the very life of this country, to be the prairie, and the railway, and the forest—their very spirit and avatar. Personally, he is often sad; his own life has been hard; and yet the heart of him is all hope and courage, all delight too in the daily planning and wrestling, the contrivance and the cleverness, the rifling and outwitting of Nature—that makes a Canadian—at any rate a Western Canadian. I suppose he doesn't know anything about art. Mr. Arthur seems to have nothing in common with him; but there is in him that rush and energy of life, from which, surely, art and poetry spring, when the time is ripe.

"Don't of course imagine anything absurd! He is just a young Scotch engineer, who seems to have made some money as people do make money here—quickly and honestly—and is shortly going into Parliament. They say that he is sure to be a great man. To us—to Philip and me, he has been extremely kind. I only meant that he seems to be in place here—or anywhere, indeed, where the world is moving; while Mr. Arthur, in Canada, is a walking anachronism. He is out of perspective; he doesn't fit.

"You will say, that if I married him, it would not be to live in Canada, and once at home again, the old estimates and 'values' would reassert themselves. But in a sense—don't be alarmed—I shall always live in Canada. Or, rather, I shall never be quite the same again; and Mr. Arthur would find me a restless, impracticable, discontented woman.

"Would it not really be kinder if I suggested to him to go home by California, while we come back again through the Rockies? Don't you think it would? I feel that I have begun to get on his nerves—as he on mine. If you were only here! But, I assure you, he doesn't look miserable; and I think he will bear up very well. And if it will be any comfort to you to be told that I know what is meant by the gnawing of the little worm, Compunction, then be comforted, dearest; for it gnaws horribly, and out of all proportion—I vow—to my crimes.

"Philip is better on the whole, and has taken an enormous fancy to Mr. Anderson. But, as I have told you all along, he is not so much better as you and I hoped he would be. I take every care of him that I can, but you know that he is not wax, when it comes to managing. However, Mr. Anderson has been a great help."

Recollections of this letter, and other thoughts besides, coming from much deeper strata of the mind than she had been willing to reveal to her mother, kept slipping at intervals through Elizabeth's consciousness, as she sat beside the lake.

A step beside her startled her, and she looked up to see Delaine approaching.

"Out already, Mr. Arthur! But I have had breakfast!"

"So have I. What a place!"

Elizabeth did not answer, but her smiling eyes swept the glorious circle of the lake.

"How soon will it all be spoilt and vulgarised?" said Delaine, with a shrug. "Next year, I suppose, a funicular, to the top of the glacier."

Elizabeth cried out.

"Why not?" he asked her, as he rather coolly and deliberately took his seat beside her. "You applaud telephones on the prairies; why not funiculars here?"

"The one serves, the other spoils," said Elizabeth eagerly.

"Serves whom? Spoils what?" The voice was cold. "All travellers are not like yourself."

"I am not afraid. The Canadians will guard their heritage."

"How dull England will seem to you when you go back to it!" he said to her, after a moment. His tone had an under-note of bitterness which Elizabeth uncomfortably recognised.

"Oh! I have a way of liking what I must like," she said, hurriedly. "Just now, certainly, I am in love with deserts—flat or mountainous—tempered by a private car."

He laughed perfunctorily. And suddenly it seemed to her that he had come out to seek her with a purpose, and that a critical moment might be approaching. Her cheeks flushed, and to hide them she leant over the water's edge and began to trail her finger in its clear wave.

He, however, sat in hesitation, looking at her, the prey of thoughts to which she had no clue. He could not make up his mind, though he had just spent an almost sleepless night on the attempt to do it.

The silence became embarrassing. Then, if he still groped, she seemed to see her way, and took it.

"It was very good of you to come out and join our wanderings," she said suddenly. Her voice was clear and kind. He started.

"You know I could ask for nothing better," was his slow reply, not without dignity. "It has been an immense privilege to see you like this, day by day."

Elizabeth's pulse quickened.

"How can I manage it?" she desperately thought. "But I must—"

"That's very sweet of you," she said aloud, "when I have bored you so with my raptures. And now it's coming to an end, like all nice things. Philip and I think of staying a little in Vancouver. And the Governor has asked us to go over to Victoria for a few days. You, I suppose, will be doing the proper round, and going back by Seattle and San Francisco?"

Delaine received the blow—and understood it. There had been no definite plans ahead. Tacitly, it had been assumed, he thought, that he was to return with them to Montreal and England. This gentle question, then, was Elizabeth's way of telling him that his hopes were vain and his journey fruitless.

He had not often been crossed in his life, and a flood of resentment surged up in a very perplexed mind.

"Thank you. Yes—I shall go home by San Francisco."

The touch of haughtiness in his manner, the manner of one accustomed all his life to be a prominent and considered person in the world, did not disguise from Elizabeth the soreness underneath. It was hard to hurt her old friend. But she could only sit as though she felt nothing—meant nothing—of any importance.

And she achieved it to perfection. Delaine, through all his tumult of feeling, was sharply conscious of her grace, her reticence, her soft dignity. They were exactly what he coveted in a wife—what he hoped he had captured in Elizabeth. How was it they had been snatched from him? He turned blindly on the obstacle that had risen in his path, and the secret he had not yet decided how to handle began to run away with him.

He bent forward, with a slightly heightened colour.

"Lady Merton—we might not have another opportunity—will you allow me a few frank words with you—the privilege of an old friend?"

Elizabeth turned her face to him, and a pair of startled eyes that tried not to waver.

"Of course, Mr. Arthur," she said smiling. "Have I been doing anything dreadful?"

"May I ask what you personally know of this Mr. Anderson?"

He saw—or thought he saw—her brace herself under the sudden surprise of the name, and her momentary discomfiture pleased him.

"What I know of Mr. Anderson?" she repeated wondering. "Why, no more than we all know. What do you mean, Mr. Arthur? Ah, yes, I remember, you first met him in Winnipeg; we made acquaintance with him the day before."

"For the first time? But you are now seeing a great deal of him. Are you quite sure—forgive me if I seem impertinent—that he is—quite the person to be admitted to your daily companionship?"

He spoke slowly and harshly. The effort required before a naturally amiable and nervous man could bring himself to put such an uncomfortable question made it appear particularly offensive.

"Our daily companionship?" repeated Elizabeth in bewilderment. "What can you mean, Mr. Arthur? What is wrong with Mr. Anderson? You saw that everybody at Winnipeg seemed to know him and respect him; people like the Chief Justice, and the Senator—what was his name?—and Monsieur Mariette. I don't understand why you ask me such a thing. Why should we suppose there are any mysteries about Mr. Anderson?"

Unconsciously her slight figure had stiffened, her voice had changed.

Delaine felt an admonitory qualm. He would have drawn back; but it was too late. He went on doggedly—

"Were not all these persons you named acquainted with Mr. Anderson in his public capacity? His success in the strike of last year brought him a great notoriety. But his private history—his family and antecedents—have you gathered anything at all about them?"

Something that he could not decipher flashed through Elizabeth's expression. It was a strange and thrilling sense that what she had gathered she would not reveal for—a kingdom!

"Monsieur Mariette told me all that anyone need want to know!" she cried, breathing quick. "Ask him what he thinks—what he feels! But if you ask me, I think Mr. Anderson carries his history in his face."

Delaine pondered a moment, while Elizabeth waited, challenging, expectant, her brown eyes all vivacity.

"Well—some facts have come to my knowledge," he said, at last, "which have made me ask you these questions. My only object—you must, you will admit that!—is to save you possible pain—a possible shock."

"Mr. Arthur!" the voice was peremptory—"If you have learned anything about Mr. Anderson's private history—by chance—without his knowledge—that perhaps he would rather we did not know—I beg you will not tell me—indeed—please—I forbid you to tell me. We owe him much kindness these last few weeks. I cannot gossip about him behind his back."

All her fine slenderness of form, her small delicacy of feature, seemed to him tense and vibrating, like some precise and perfect instrument strained to express a human feeling or intention. But what feeling? While he divined it, was she herself unconscious of it? His bitterness grew.

"Dear Lady Merton—can you not trust an old friend?"

She did not soften.

"I do trust him. But"—her smile flashed—"even new acquaintances have their rights."

"You will not understand," he said, earnestly. "What is in my mind came to me, through no wish or will of mine. You cannot suppose that I have been prying into Mr. Anderson's affairs! But now that the information is mine, I feel a great responsibility towards you."

"Don't feel it. I am a wilful woman."

"A rather perplexing one! May I at least be sure that"—he hesitated—"that you will be on your guard?"

"On my guard?" she lifted her eyebrows proudly—"and against what?"

"That is precisely what you won't let me tell you."

She laughed—a little fiercely.

"There we are; no forrarder. But please remember, Mr. Arthur, how soon we shall all be separating. Nothing very dreadful can happen in these few days—can it?"

For the first time there was a touch of malice in her smile.

Delaine rose, took one or two turns along the path in front of her, and then suddenly stopped beside her.

"I think"—he said, with emphasis, "that Mr. Anderson will probably find himself summoned away—immediately—before you get to Vancouver. But that I will discuss with him. You could give me no address, so I have not yet been able to communicate with him."

Again Elizabeth's eyebrows went up. She rose.

"Of course you will do what you think best. Shall we go back to the hotel?"

They walked along in silence. He saw that she was excited, and that he had completely missed his stroke; but he did not see how to mend the situation.

"Oh! there is Philip, going to fish," said Elizabeth at last, as though nothing had happened. "I wondered what could possibly have got him up so early."

Philip waved to her as she spoke, shouting something which the mountain echoes absorbed. He was accompanied by a young man, who seemed to be attached to the hotel as guide, fisherman, hunter—at the pleasure of visitors. But Elizabeth had already discovered that he had the speech of a gentleman, and attended the University of Manitoba during the winter. In the absence of Anderson, Philip had no doubt annexed him for the morning.

There was a pile of logs lying on the lake side. Philip, rod in hand, began to scramble over them to a point where several large trunks overhung deep water. His companion meanwhile was seated on the moss, busy with some preparations.

"I hope Philip will be careful," said Delaine, suddenly. "There is nothing so slippery as logs."

Elizabeth, who had been dreaming, looked up anxiously. As she did so Philip, high perched on the furthest logs, turned again to shout to his sister, his light figure clear against the sunlit distance. Then the figure wavered, there was a sound of crashing wood, and Philip fell head-foremost into the lake before him.

The young man on the bank looked up, threw away his rod and his coat, and was just plunging into the lake when he was anticipated by another man who had come running down the bank of the hotel, and was already in the water. Elizabeth, as she rushed along the edge, recognized Anderson. Philip seemed to have disappeared; but Anderson dived, and presently emerged with a limp burden. The guide was now aiding him, and between them they brought young Gaddesden to land. The whole thing passed so rapidly that Delaine and Elizabeth, running at full speed, had hardly reached the spot before Anderson was on the shore, bearing the lad in his arms.

Elizabeth bent over him with a moan of anguish. He seemed to her dead.

"He has only fainted," said Anderson peremptorily. "We must get him in." And he hurried on, refusing Delaine's help, carrying the thin body apparently with ease along the path and up the steps to the hotel. The guide had already been sent flying ahead to warn the household.

Thus, by one of the commonplace accidents of travel, the whole scene was changed for this group of travellers. Philip Gaddesden would have taken small harm from his tumble into the lake, but for the fact that the effects of rheumatic fever were still upon him. As it was, a certain amount of fever, and some heart-symptoms that it was thought had been overcome, reappeared, and within a few hours of the accident it became plain that, although he was in no danger, they would be detained at least ten days, perhaps a fortnight, at Lake Louise. Elizabeth sat down in deep despondency to write to her mother, and then lingered awhile with the letter before her, her head in her hands, pondering with emotion what she and Philip owed to George Anderson, who had, it seemed, arrived by a night train, and walked up to the hotel, in the very nick of time. As to the accident itself, no doubt the guide, a fine swimmer and coureur de bois, would have been sufficient, unaided, to save her brother. But after all, it was Anderson's strong arms that had drawn him from the icy depths of the lake, and carried him to safety! And since? Never had telephone and railway, and general knowledge of the resources at command, been worked more skilfully than by him, and the kind people of the hotel. "Don't be the least anxious"—she had written to her mother—"we have a capital doctor—all the chemist's stuff we want—and we could have a nurse at any moment. Mr. Anderson has only to order one up from the camp hospital in the pass. But for the present, Simpson and I are enough for the nursing."

She heard voices in the next room; a faint question from Philip, Anderson replying. What an influence this man of strong character had already obtained over her wilful, self-indulgent brother! She saw the signs of it in many directions; and she was passionately grateful for it. Her thoughts went wandering back over the past three weeks—over the whole gradual unveiling of Anderson's personality. She recalled her first impressions of him the day of the "sink-hole." An ordinary, strong, capable, ambitious young man, full of practical interests, with brusque manners, and a visible lack of some of the outer wrappings to which she was accustomed—it was so that she had first envisaged him. Then at Winnipeg—through Mariette and others—she had seen him as other men saw him, his seniors and contemporaries, the men engaged with him in the making of this vast country. She had appreciated his character in what might be hereafter, apparently, its public aspects; the character of one for whom the world surrounding him was eagerly prophesying a future and a career. His profound loyalty to Canada, and to certain unspoken ideals behind, which were really the source of the loyalty; the atmosphere at once democratic and imperial in which his thoughts and desires moved, which had more than once communicated its passion to her; a touch of poetry, of melancholy, of greatness even—all this she had gradually perceived. Winnipeg and the prairie journey had developed him thus before her.

So much for the second stage in her knowledge of him. There was a third; she was in the midst of it. Her face flooded with colour against her will. "Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness." The words rushed into her mind. She hoped, as one who wished him well, that he would marry soon and happily. And the woman who married him would find it no tame future.

Suddenly Delaine's warnings occurred to her. She laughed, a little hysterically.

Could anyone have shown himself more helpless, useless, incompetent, than Arthur Delaine since the accident? Yet he was still on the spot. She realised, indeed, that it was hardly possible for their old friend to desert them under the circumstances. But he merely represented an additional burden.

A knock at the sitting-room door disturbed her. Anderson appeared.

"I am off to Banff, Lady Merton," he said from the threshold. "I think I have all your commissions. Is your letter ready?"

She sealed it and gave it to him. Then she looked up at him; and for the first time he saw her tremulous and shaken; not for her brother, but for himself.

"I don't know how to thank you." She offered her hand; and one of those beautiful looks—generous, friendly, sincere—of which she had the secret.

He, too, flushed, his eyes held a moment by hers. Then he, somewhat brusquely, disengaged himself.

"Why, I did nothing! He was in no danger; the guide would have had him out in a twinkle. I wish"—he frowned—"you wouldn't look so done up over it."

"Oh! I am all right."

"I brought you a book this morning. Mercifully I left it in the drawing-room, so it hasn't been in the lake."

He drew it from his pocket. It was a French novel she had expressed a wish to read.

She exclaimed,

"How did you get it?"

"I found Mariette had it with him. He sends it me from Vancouver. Will you promise to read it—and rest?"

He drew a sofa towards the window. The June sunset was blazing on the glacier without. Would he next offer to put a shawl over her, and tuck her up? She retreated hastily to the writing-table, one hand upon it. He saw the lines of her gray dress, her small neck and head; the Quakerish smoothness of her brown hair, against the light. The little figure was grace, refinement, embodied. But it was a grace that implied an environment—the cosmopolitan, luxurious environment, in which such women naturally move.

His look clouded. He said a hasty good-bye and departed. Elizabeth was left breathing quick, one hand on her breast. It was as though she had escaped something—or missed something.

As he left the hotel, Anderson found himself intercepted by Delaine in the garden, and paused at once to give him the latest news.

"The report is really good, everything considered," he said, with a cordiality born of their common anxiety; and he repeated the doctor's last words to himself.

"Excellent!" said Delaine; then, clearing his throat, "Mr. Anderson, may I have some conversation with you?"

Anderson looked surprised, threw him a keen glance, and invited him to accompany him part of the way to Laggan. They turned into a solitary road, running between the woods. It was late evening, and the sun was striking through the Laggan valley beneath them in low shafts of gold and purple.

"I am afraid what I have to say will be disagreeable to you," began Delaine, abruptly. "And on this particular day—when we owe you so much—it is more than disagreeable to myself. But I have no choice. By some extraordinary chance, with which I beg you to believe my own will has had nothing to do, I have become acquainted with something—something that concerns you privately—something that I fear will be a great shock to you."