“My sister marry a mining engineer!—­with a drunken old robber for a father!  By Jove!  Anybody talking nonsense of that kind will jolly well have to reckon with me!  Elizabeth!—­you may say what you like, but I am the head of the family!”

Anderson found the head of the family in bed, surrounded by novels, and a dozen books on big-game shooting in the Rockies.  Philip received him with an evident and ungracious embarrassment.

“I am awfully sorry—­beastly business.  Hard lines on you, of course—­very.  Hope they’ll get the men.”

“Thank you.  They are doing their best.”

Anderson sat down beside the lad.  The fragility of his look struck him painfully, and the pathetic contrast between it and the fretting spirit—­the books of travel and adventure heaped round him.

“Have you been ill again?” he asked in his kind, deep voice.

“Oh, just a beastly chill.  Elizabeth would make me take too many wraps.  Everyone knows you oughtn’t to get overheated walking.”

“Do you want to stay on here longer?”

“Not I!  What do I care about glaciers and mountains and that sort of stuff if I can’t hunt?  But Elizabeth’s got at the doctor somehow, and he won’t let me go for three or four days unless I kick over the traces.  I daresay I shall.”

“No you won’t—­for your sister’s sake.  I’ll see all arrangements are made.”

Philip made no direct reply.  He lay staring at the ceiling—­till at last he said—­

“Delaine’s going.  He’s going to-morrow.  He gets on Elizabeth’s nerves.”

“Did he say anything to you about me?” said Anderson.

Philip flushed.

“Well, I daresay he did.”

“Make your mind easy, Gaddesden.  A man with my story is not going to ask your sister to marry him.”

Philip looked up.  Anderson sat composedly erect, the traces of his nights of sleeplessness and revolt marked on every feature, but as much master of himself and his life—­so Gaddesden intuitively felt—­as he had ever been.  A movement of remorse and affection stirred in the young man mingled with the strength of other inherited things.

“Awfully sorry, you know,” he said clumsily, but this time sincerely.  “I don’t suppose it makes any difference to you that your father—­well, I’d better not talk about it.  But you see—­Elizabeth might marry anybody.  She might have married heaps of times since Merton died, if she hadn’t been such an icicle.  She’s got lots of money, and—­well, I don’t want to be snobbish—­but at home—­we—­our family—­”

“I understand,” said Anderson, perhaps a little impatiently—­“you are great people.  I understood that all along.”

Family pride cried out in Philip.  “Then why the deuce—­” But he said aloud in some confusion, “I suppose that sounded disgusting”—­then floundering deeper—­“but you see—­well, I’m very fond of Elizabeth!”

Anderson rose and walked to the window which commanded a view of the railway line.