But—­the course was not clear.  From many signs, she understood how deeply the humiliation of the scene at Sicamous had entered into a proud man’s blood.  Others might forget; he remembered.  Moreover, that sense of responsibility—­partial responsibility at least—­for his father’s guilt and degradation, of which he had spoken to her at Glacier, had, she perceived, gone deep with him.  It had strengthened a stern and melancholy view of life, inclining him to turn away from personal joy, to an exclusive concern with public duties and responsibilities.

And this whole temper had no doubt been increased by his perception of the Gaddesdens’ place in English society.  He dared not—­he would not—­ask a woman so reared in the best that England had to give, now that he understood what that best might be, to renounce it all in favour of what he had to offer.  He realised that there was a generous weakness in her own heart on which he might have played.  But he would not play; his fixed intention was to disappear as soon as possible from her life; and it was his honest hope that she would marry in her own world and forget him.  In fact he was the prey of a kind of moral terror that here also, as in the case of his father, he might make some ghastly mistake, pursuing his own will under the guise of love, as he had once pursued it under the guise of retribution—­to Elizabeth’s hurt and his own remorse.

All this Elizabeth understood, more or less plainly.  Then came the question—­granted the situation, how was she to deal with it?  Just as he surmised that he could win her if he would, she too believed that were she merely to set herself to prove her own love and evoke his, she could probably break down his resistance.  A woman knows her own power.  Feverishly, Elizabeth was sometimes on the point of putting it out, of so provoking and appealing to the passion she divined, as to bring him, whether he would or no, to her feet.

But she hesitated.  She too felt the responsibility of his life, as of hers.  Could she really do this thing—­not only begin it, but carry it through without repentance, and without recoil?

She made herself look steadily at this English spectacle with its luxurious complexity, its concentration within a small space of all the delicacies of sense and soul, its command of a rich European tradition, in which art and literature are living streams springing from fathomless depths of life.  Could she, whose every fibre responded so perfectly to the stimulus of this environment, who up till now—­but for moments of revolt—­had been so happy and at ease in it, could she wrench herself from it—­put it behind her—­and adapt herself to quite another, without, so to speak, losing herself, and half her value, whatever that might be, as a human being?

As we know, she had already asked herself the question in some fashion, under the shadow of the Rockies.  But to handle it in London was a more pressing and poignant affair.  It was partly the characteristic question of the modern woman, jealous, as women have never been before in the world’s history, on behalf of her own individuality.  But Elizabeth put it still more in the interests of her pure and passionate feeling for Anderson.  He must not—­he should not—­run any risks in loving her!