So Elizabeth named it—­Lake George—­after her husband; seeing that it was his topographical divination, his tracking of the lake through the ingenious unravelling of a score of Indian clues which had led them at last to that Pisgah height whence the silver splendour of it had first been seen.  But the name was so hotly repudiated by Anderson on the ground of there being already a famous and an historical Lake George on the American continent, that the probability is, when that noble sheet of water comes to be generally visited of mankind, it will be known rather as Lake Elizabeth; and so those early ambitions of Elizabeth which she had expressed to Philip in the first days of her Canadian journeying, will be fulfilled.

[Illustration:  “LAKE ELIZABETH”]

Alas!—­poor Philip!  Elizabeth’s black serge dress, and the black ribbon on her white sun-hat were the outward tokens of a grief, cherished deep in her protesting, pitiful heart.  Her brother had lived for some four months after her engagement to Anderson; always, in spite of encouraging doctors, under the same sharp premonition of death which had dictated his sudden change of attitude towards his Canadian friend.  In the January of the new year, Anderson had joined them at Bordighera, and there, after many alternating hopes and fears, a sudden attack of pneumonia had slit the thin-spun life.  A few weeks later, at Mrs. Gaddesden’s urgent desire, and while she was in the care of a younger sister to whom she was tenderly attached, there had been a quiet wedding at Genoa, and a very pale and sad Elizabeth had been carried by her Anderson to some of the beloved Italian towns, where for so long she had reaped a yearly harvest of delight.  In Rome, Florence, and Venice she must needs rouse herself, if only to show the keen novice eyes, beside her what to look at, and to grapple with the unexpected remarks which the spectacle evoked from Anderson.  He looked in respectful silence at Bellini and Tintoret; but the industrial growth of the north, the strikes of braccianti on the central plains, and the poverty of Sicily and the south—­in these problems he was soon deeply plunged, teaching himself Italian in order to understand them.

Then they had returned to Mrs. Gaddesden, and to the surrender of Martindale to its new master.  For the estate went to a cousin, and when the beauty and the burden of it were finally gone, Philip’s gentle ineffectual mother departed with relief to the moss-grown dower-house beside Bassenthwaite lake, there to sorrow for her only son, and to find in the expansion of Elizabeth’s life, in Elizabeth’s letters, and the prospects of Elizabeth’s visits, the chief means left of courage and resignation.  Philip’s love for Anderson, his actual death in those strong arms, had strengthened immeasurably the latter’s claim upon her; and in March she parted with him and Elizabeth, promising them boldly that she would come to them in the fall, and spend a Canadian winter with them.