for Delaine as a fine gentleman with a useless education, inclined to patronise “colonists.”  The two men had jarred from the beginning, and at Banff, Anderson had both divined in him the possible suitor of Lady Merton, and had also become aware that Delaine resented his own intrusion upon the party, and the rapid intimacy which had grown up between him and the brother and sister.  Well, let him use his chance! if it so pleased him.  No promise whatever should be asked of him; there should be no suggestion even of a line of action.  The bare fact which he had become possessed of should be admitted, and he should be left to deal with it.  Upon his next step would depend Anderson’s; that was all.

But Lady Merton?

Anderson stared across the near valley, up the darkness beyond, where lay the forests of the Yoho, and to those ethereal summits whence a man might behold on one side the smoke-wreaths of the great railway, and on the other side the still virgin peaks of the northern Rockies, untamed, untrodden.  But his eyes were holden; he saw neither snow, nor forests, and the roar of the stream dashing at his feet was unheard.

Three weeks, was it, since he had first seen that delicately oval face, and those clear eyes?  The strong man—­accustomed to hold himself in check, to guard his own strength as the instrument, firm and indispensable, of an iron will—­recoiled from the truth he was at last compelled to recognise.  In this daily companionship with a sensitive and charming woman, endowed beneath her light reserve with all the sweetness of unspoilt feeling, while yet commanding through her long training in an old society a thousand delicacies and subtleties, which played on Anderson’s fresh senses like the breeze on young leaves—­whither had he been drifting—­to the brink of what precipice had he brought himself, unknowing?

He stood there indefinitely, among the charred tree-trunks that bordered the line, his arms folded, looking straight before him, motionless.

Supposing to-day had been yesterday, need he—­together with this sting of passion—­have felt also this impotent and angry despair?  Before his eyes had seen that figure lying on the straw of Mrs. Ginnell’s outhouse, could he ever have dreamed it possible that Elizabeth Merton should marry him?

Yes!  He thought, trembling from head to foot, of that expression in her eyes he had seen that very afternoon.  Again and again he had checked his feeling by the harsh reminder of her social advantages.  But, at this moment of crisis, the man in him stood up, confident and rebellious.  He knew himself sound, intellectually and morally.  There was a career before him, to which a cool and reasonable ambition looked forward without any paralysing doubts.  In this growing Canada, measuring himself against the other men of the moment, he calmly foresaw his own growing place.  As to money, he would make it; he was in process of making it, honourably and sufficiently.