Elizabeth sat down in deep despondency to write to her mother, and then lingered awhile with the letter before her, her head in her hands, pondering with emotion what she and Philip owed to George Anderson, who had, it seemed, arrived by a night train, and walked up to the hotel, in the very nick of time.  As to the accident itself, no doubt the guide, a fine swimmer and coureur de bois, would have been sufficient, unaided, to save her brother.  But after all, it was Anderson’s strong arms that had drawn him from the icy depths of the lake, and carried him to safety!  And since?  Never had telephone and railway, and general knowledge of the resources at command, been worked more skilfully than by him, and the kind people of the hotel.  “Don’t be the least anxious”—­she had written to her mother—­“we have a capital doctor—­all the chemist’s stuff we want—­and we could have a nurse at any moment.  Mr. Anderson has only to order one up from the camp hospital in the pass.  But for the present, Simpson and I are enough for the nursing.”

She heard voices in the next room; a faint question from Philip, Anderson replying.  What an influence this man of strong character had already obtained over her wilful, self-indulgent brother!  She saw the signs of it in many directions; and she was passionately grateful for it.  Her thoughts went wandering back over the past three weeks—­over the whole gradual unveiling of Anderson’s personality.  She recalled her first impressions of him the day of the “sink-hole.”  An ordinary, strong, capable, ambitious young man, full of practical interests, with brusque manners, and a visible lack of some of the outer wrappings to which she was accustomed—­it was so that she had first envisaged him.  Then at Winnipeg—­through Mariette and others—­she had seen him as other men saw him, his seniors and contemporaries, the men engaged with him in the making of this vast country.  She had appreciated his character in what might be hereafter, apparently, its public aspects; the character of one for whom the world surrounding him was eagerly prophesying a future and a career.  His profound loyalty to Canada, and to certain unspoken ideals behind, which were really the source of the loyalty; the atmosphere at once democratic and imperial in which his thoughts and desires moved, which had more than once communicated its passion to her; a touch of poetry, of melancholy, of greatness even—­all this she had gradually perceived.  Winnipeg and the prairie journey had developed him thus before her.

So much for the second stage in her knowledge of him.  There was a third; she was in the midst of it.  Her face flooded with colour against her will.  “Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness.”  The words rushed into her mind.  She hoped, as one who wished him well, that he would marry soon and happily.  And the woman who married him would find it no tame future.

Suddenly Delaine’s warnings occurred to her.  She laughed, a little hysterically.