And as she answered to it, there was no sense of renunciation.  She was denying no old affection, deserting no ancient loyalty.  Old and new; she seemed to be the child of both—­gathering them both to her breast.

Yet, practically, what was going to happen to her, she did not know.  She did not say to herself, “It is all clear, and I am going to marry George Anderson!” But what she knew at last was that there was no dull hindrance in herself, no cowardice in her own will; she was ready, when life and Anderson should call her.

At the foot of the stairs Mariette’s gaunt and spectacled face broke in upon her trance.  He had just arrived as she was departing.

“You are off—­so early?” he asked her, reproachfully.

“I want to see Philip before he settles for the night.”

“Anderson, too, meant to look in upon your brother.”

“Yes?” said Elizabeth vaguely, conscious of her own reddening, and of Mariette’s glance.

“You have heard his news?” He drew her a little apart into the shelter of a stand of flowers.  “We both go next week.  You—­Lady Merton—­have been our good angel—­our providence.  Has he been saying that to you?  All the same—­ma collegue—­I am disappointed in you!”

Elizabeth’s eye wavered under his.

“We agreed, did we not—­at Glacier—­on what was to be done next to our friend?  Oh! don’t dispute!  I laid it down—­and you accepted it.  As for me, I have done nothing but pursue that object ever since—­in my own way.  And you, Madam?”

As he stood over her, a lean Don Quixotish figure, his long arms akimbo, Elizabeth’s fluttering laugh broke out.

“Inquisitor!  Good night!”

“Good night—­but—­just a word!  Anderson has done well here.  Your public men say agreeable things of him.  He will play your English game—­your English Imperialist game—­which I can’t play.  But only, if he is happy—­if the fire in him is fed.  Consider!  Is it not a patriotic duty to feed it?”

And grasping her hand, he looked at her with a gentle mockery that passed immediately into that sudden seriousness—­that unconscious air of command—­of which the man of interior life holds the secret.  In his jests even, he is still, by natural gift, the confessor, the director, since he sees everything as the mystic sees it, sub specie aeternitatis.

Elizabeth’s soft colour came and went.  But she made no reply—­except it were through an imperceptible pressure of the hand holding her own.

At that moment the ex-Viceroy, resplendent in his ribbon of the Garter, who was passing through the hall, perceived her, pounced upon her, and insisted on seeing her to her carriage.  Mariette, as he mounted the staircase, watched the two figures disappear—­smiling to himself.

But on the way home the cloud of sisterly grief descended on Elizabeth.  How could she think of herself—­when Philip was ill—­suffering—­threatened?  And how would he bear the news of Anderson’s hastened departure?