worked by an old Cambridge friend of his.  The night was cold, and he was evidently tired by the long journey from Winnipeg.  Elizabeth was in despair, but could not move him at all.  Then Anderson had intervened; had found somehow and somewhere a trapper just in from the mountains with a wonderful “catch” of fox and marten; and in the amusement of turning over a bundle of magnificent furs, and of buying something straight from the hunter for his mother, the youth had forgotten his waywardness.  Behind his back, Elizabeth had warmly thanked her lieutenant.

“He only wanted a little distraction,” Anderson had said, with a shy smile, as though he both liked and disliked her thanks.  And then, impulsively, she had told him a good deal about Philip and his illness, and their mother, and the old house in Cumberland.  She, of all persons, to be so communicative about the family affairs to a stranger!  Was it that two days in a private car in Canada went as far as a month’s acquaintance elsewhere?

Another passenger had been introduced to Lady Merton by Anderson, an hour before the departure of the car, and had made such a pleasant impression on her that he also had been asked to join the party, and had very gladly consented.  This was the American, Mr. Val Morton, now the official receiver, so Elizabeth understood, of a great railway system in the middle west of the United States.  The railway had been handed over to him in a bankrupt condition.  His energy and probity were engaged in pulling it through.  More connections between it and the Albertan railways were required; and he was in Canada looking round and negotiating.  He was already known to the Chief Justice and Mariette, and Elizabeth fell quickly in love with his white hair, his black eyes, his rapier-like slenderness and keenness, and that pleasant mingling in him—­so common in the men of his race—­of the dry shrewdness of the financier with a kind of headlong courtesy to women.

On sped the car through the gate of the Rockies.  The mountains grew deeper, the snows deeper against the blue, the air more dazzling, the forests closer, breathing balm into the sunshine.

Suddenly the car slackened and stopped.  No sign of a station.  Only a rustic archway, on which was written “The Great Divide,” and beneath the archway two small brooklets issuing, one flowing to the right, the other to the left.

They all left the car and stood round the tiny streams.  They were on the watershed.  The water in the one streamlet flowed to the Atlantic, that in its fellow to the Pacific.

Eternal parable of small beginnings and vast fates!  But in this setting of untrodden mountains, and beside this railway which now for a few short years had been running its parlour and dining cars, its telegraphs and electric lights and hotels, a winding thread of life and civilisation, through the lonely and savage splendours of snow-peak and rock, transforming day by day the destinies of Canada—­the parable became a truth, proved upon the pulses of men.