Elizabeth laughed, a bright colour in her cheeks.  Again the wilderness ran through her blood, answering the challenge of Nature.  Faint!—­she was more inclined to sing or shout.  And with the exhilaration, physical and mental, that stole upon her, there mingled secretly, the first thrill of passion she had ever known.  Anderson sat beside her, once more silent after his burst of talk.  She was vividly conscious of him—­of his bare curly head—­of certain lines of fatigue and suffering in the bronzed face.  And it was conveyed to her that, although he was clearly preoccupied and sad, he was yet conscious of her in the same way.  Once, as they were passing the highest bridge of all, where, carried on a great steel arch, that has replaced the older trestles, the rails run naked and gleaming, without the smallest shred of wall or parapet, across a gash in the mountain up which they were creeping, and at a terrific height above the valley, Elizabeth, who was sitting with her back to the engine, bent suddenly to one side, leaning over the little railing and looking ahead—­that she might if possible get a clearer sight of Mount Macdonald, the giant at whose feet lies Roger’s Pass.  Suddenly, as her weight pressed against the ironwork where only that morning a fastening had been mended, she felt a grip on her arm.  She drew back, startled.

“I beg your pardon!” said Anderson, smiling, but a trifle paler than before.  “I’m not troubled with nerves for myself, but—­”

He did not complete the sentence, and Elizabeth, could find nothing to say.

“Why, Elizabeth’s not afraid!” cried Philip, scornfully.

“This is Roger’s Pass, and here we are at the top of the Selkirks,” said Anderson, rising.  “The train will wait here some twenty minutes.  Perhaps you would like to walk about.”

They descended, all but Philip, who grumbled at the cold, wrapped himself in a rug inside the car, and summoned Yerkes to bring him a cup of coffee.

On this height indeed, and beneath the precipices of Mount Macdonald, which rise some five thousand feet perpendicularly above the railway, the air was chill and the clouds had gathered.  On the right, ran a line of glacier-laden peaks, calling to their fellows across the pass.  The ravine itself, darkly magnificent, made a gulf of shadow out of which rose glacier and snow slope, now veiled and now revealed by scudding cloud.  Heavy rain had not long since fallen on the pass; the small stream, winding and looping through the narrow strip of desolate ground which marks the summit, roared in flood through marshy growths of dank weed and stunted shrub; and the noise reverberated from the mountain walls, pressing straight and close on either hand.

“Hark!” cried Elizabeth, standing still, her face and her light dress beaten by the wind.

A sound which was neither thunder nor the voice of the stream rose and swelled and filled the pass.  Another followed it.  Anderson pointed to the snowy crags of Mount Macdonald, and there, leaping from ledge to ledge, they saw the summer avalanches descend, roaring as they came, till they sank engulfed in a vaporous whirl of snow.