“Oh, yes!  But you’ve got to be a big man to fill the position.  However, there’s money enough.  They’re all rich—­and they marry money.”

Anderson murmured something inaudible, and the young man departed.

A little later Anderson and Elizabeth were seated together in the Red Drawing Room.  Mrs. Gaddesden, after a little perfunctory conversation with the new-comer, had disappeared on the plea of letters to write.  The girl in white, the centre of a large party in the hall, was flirting to her heart’s content.  Philip would have dearly liked to stay and flirt with her himself; but his mother, terrified by his pallor and fatigue after the exertion of the shoot, had hurried him off to take a warm bath and rest before dinner.  So that Anderson and Elizabeth were alone.

Conversation between them did not move easily.  Elizabeth was conscious of an oppression against which it seemed vain to fight.  Up to the moment of his sailing from Canada his letters had been frank and full, the letters of a deeply attached friend, though with no trace in them of the language of love.  What change was it that the touch of English ground—­the sight of Martindale—­had wrought?  He talked with some readiness of the early stages of his mission—­of the kindness shown to him by English public men, and the impressions of a first night in the House of Commons.  But his manner was constrained; anything that he said might have been heard by all the world; and as their talk progressed, Elizabeth felt a miserable paralysis descending on her own will.  She grew whiter and whiter.  This old house in which they sat, with its splendours and treasures, this environment of the past all about them seemed to engulf and entomb them both.  She had looked forward with a girlish pleasure—­and yet with a certain tremor—­to showing Anderson her old home, the things she loved and had inherited.  And now it was as though she were vulgarly conscious of wealth and ancestry as dividing her from him.  The wildness within her which found its scope and its voice in Canada was here like an imprisoned stream, chafing in caverns underground.  Ah! it had been easy to defy the Old World in Canada, its myriad voices and claims—­the many-fingered magic with which an old society plays on those born into it!

“I shall be here perhaps a month,” said Anderson, “but then I shall be wanted at Ottawa.”

And he began to describe a new matter in which he had been lately engaged—­a large development scheme applying to some of the great Peace River region north of Edmonton.  And as he told her of his August journey through this noble country, with its superb rivers, its shining lakes and forests, and its scattered settlers, waiting for a Government which was their servant and not their tyrant, to come and help their first steps in ordered civilisation; to bring steamers to their waters, railways to link their settlements, and fresh settlers to let loose the fertile forces of their earth—­she suddenly saw in him his old self—­the Anderson who had sat beside her in the crossing of the prairies, who had looked into her eyes the day of Roger’s Pass.  He had grown older and thinner; his hair was even lightly touched with grey.  But the traces in him of endurance and of pain were like the weathering of a fine building; mellowing had come, and strength had not been lost.