When the verdicts had been given, the doctor and he walked away from the court together.  The necessary formalities were carried through, a coffin ordered, and provision made for the burial of Robert Anderson.  As the two men passed once or twice through the groups now lounging and smoking as before outside the hotel, all conversation ceased, and all eyes followed Anderson.  Sincere pity was felt for him; and at the same time men asked each other anxiously how the revelation would affect his political and other chances.

Late in the same evening the burial of McEwen took place.  A congregational minister at the graveside said a prayer for mercy on the sinner.  Anderson had not asked him to do it, and felt a dull resentment of the man’s officiousness, and the unctious length of his prayer.  Half an hour later he was on the platform, waiting for the train to Glacier.

He arrived there in the first glorious dawn of a summer morning.  Over the vast Illecillowaet glacier rosy feather-clouds were floating in a crystal air, beneath a dome of pale blue.  Light mists rose from the forests and the course of the river, and above them shone the dazzling snows, the hanging glaciers, and glistening rock faces, ledge piled on ledge, of the Selkirk giants—­Hermit and Tupper, Avalanche and Sir Donald—­with that cleft of the pass between.

The pleasant hotel, built to offer as much shelter and comfort as possible to the tired traveller and climber, was scarcely awake.  A sleepy-eyed Japanese showed Anderson to his room.  He threw himself on the bed, longing for sleep, yet incapable of it.  He was once more under the same roof with Elizabeth Merton—­and for the last time!  He longed for her presence, her look, her touch; and yet with equal intensity he shrank from seeing her.  That very morning through the length of Canada and the States would go out the news of the train-robbery on the main line of the C.P.R., and with it the “dramatic” story of himself and his father, made more dramatic by a score of reporters.  And as the news of his appointment, in the papers of the day before, had made him a public person, and had been no doubt telegraphed to London and Europe, so also would it be with the news of the “hold-up,” and his own connection with it; partly because it had happened on the C.P.R.; still more because of the prominence given to his name the day before.

He felt himself a disgraced man; and he had already put from him all thought of a public career.  Yet he wondered, not without self-contempt, as he lay there in the broadening light, what it was in truth that made the enormous difference between this Monday and the Monday before.  His father was dead, and had died in the very commission of a criminal act.  But all or nearly all that Anderson knew now about his character he had known before this happened.  The details given by the Nevada officers were indeed new to him; but he had shrewdly suspected all along that the record, did he know it, would be something like that.  If such a parentage in itself involves stain and degradation, the stain and degradation had been always there, and the situation, looked at philosophically, was no worse for the catastrophe which had intervened between this week and last.