During the latter days of this fortnight, indeed, he could not do enough for his father.  He had made all the Vancouver arrangements; he had supplied him amply with clothes and other personal necessaries; and he came home early at night in order to sit and smoke with him.  Mrs. Ginnell, looking in of an evening, beheld what seemed to her a touching sight, though one far beyond the deserts of such creatures as McEwen—­the son reading the newspaper aloud, or playing dominoes with his father, or just smoking and chatting.  Her hard common sense as a working-woman suggested to her that Anderson was nursing illusions; and she scornfully though silently hoped that the “old rip” would soon, one way or another, be off his shoulders.

But the illusions, for the moment, were Anderson’s sustenance.  His imagination, denied a more personal and passionate food, gave itself with fire to the redeeming of an outlaw, and the paying of a spiritual debt.

It was Wednesday.  After a couple of drizzling days the weather was again fair.  The trains rolling through the pass began with these early days of July to bring a first crop of holiday-makers from Eastern Canada and the States; the hotels were filling up.  On the morrow McEwen was to start for Vancouver.  And a letter from Philip Gaddesden, delivered at Laggan in the morning, had bitterly reproached Anderson for neglecting them, and leaving him, in particular, to be bored to death by glaciers and tourists.

Early in the afternoon Anderson took his way up the mountain road to Lake Louise.  He found the English travellers established among the pines by the lake-side, Philip half asleep in a hammock strung between two pines, while Delaine was reading to Elizabeth from an article in an archaeological review on “Some Fresh Light on the Cippus of Palestrina.”

Lady Merton was embroidering; it seemed to Anderson that she was tired or depressed.  Delaine’s booming voice, and the frequent Latin passages interspersed with stammering translations of his own, in which he appeared to be interminably tangled, would be enough—­the Canadian thought—­to account for a subdued demeanour; and there was, moreover, a sudden thunderous heat in the afternoon.

Elizabeth received him a little stiffly, and Philip roused himself from sleep only to complain:  “You’ve been four mortal days without coming near us!”

“I had to go away.  I have been to Regina.”

“On politics?” asked Delaine.

“Yes.  We had a couple of meetings and a row.”

“Jolly for you!” grumbled Philip.  “But we’ve had a beastly time.  Ask Elizabeth.”

“Nothing but the weather!” said Elizabeth carelessly.  “We couldn’t even see the mountains.”

But why, as she spoke, should the delicate cheek change colour, suddenly and brightly?  The answering blood leapt in Anderson.  She had missed him, though she would not show it.

Delaine began to question him about Saskatchewan.  The Englishman’s forms of conversation were apt to be tediously inquisitive, and Anderson had often resented them.  To-day, however, he let himself be catechised patiently enough, while all the time conscious, from head to foot, of one person only—­one near and yet distant person.