“How proud you are, you Englishwomen!” he said, half frowning.  “You run yourselves down—­and at bottom there is a pride like Lucifer’s.”

“But it is not my pride,” she said, hurt, “any more than yours.  We are yours—­and you are ours.  One state—­one country.”

“No, don’t let us sentimentalise.  We have our own future.  It is not yours.”

“But you are loyal!” The note was one of pain.

“Are we?  Foolish word!  Yes, we are loyal, as you are—­loyal to a common ideal, a common mission in the world.”

“To blood also—­and to history?” Her voice was almost entreating.  What he had said seemed to jar with other and earlier sayings of his, which had stirred in her a patriotic pleasure.

He smiled at her emotion—­her implied reproach.

“Yes, we stand together.  We march together.  But Canada will have her own history; and you must not try to make it for her.”

Their eyes met; in hers exaltion, in his a touch of sternness, a moment’s revelation of the Covenanter in his soul.

Then as the delightful vision of her among the flowers, in her white dress, the mountains behind and around her, imprinted itself on his senses, he was conscious of a moment of intolerable pain.  Between her and him—­as it were—­the abyss opened.  The trembling waves of colour in the grass, the noble procession of the clouds, the gleaming of the snows, the shadow of the valleys—­they were all wiped out.  He saw instead a small unsavoury room—­the cunning eyes and coarse mouth of his father.  He saw his own future as it must now be; weighted with this burden, this secret; if indeed it were still to be a secret; if it were not rather the wiser and the manlier plan to have done with secrecy.

Elizabeth rose with a little shiver.  The wind had begun to blow cold from the northwest.

“How soon can we run down?  I hope Mr. Arthur will have sent Philip indoors.”

Anderson left Lake Louise about eight o’clock, and hurried down the Laggan road.  His mind was divided between the bitter-sweet of these last hours with Elizabeth Merton, and anxieties, small practical anxieties, about his father.  There were arrangements still to make.  He was not himself going to Vancouver.  McEwen had lately shown a strong and petulant wish to preserve his incognito, or what was left of it.  He would not have his son’s escort.  George might come and see him at Vancouver; and that would be time enough to settle up for the winter.

So Ginnell, owner of the boarding house, a stalwart Irishman of six foot three, had been appointed to see him through his journey, settle him with his new protectors, and pay all necessary expenses.

Anderson knocked at his father’s door and was allowed to enter.  He found McEwen walking up and down his room, with the aid of a stick, irritably pushing chairs and clothes out of his way.  The room was in squalid disorder, and its inmate had a flushed, exasperated look that did not escape Anderson’s notice.  He thought it probable that his father was already repenting his consent to go to Vancouver, and he avoided general conversation as much as possible.