that he was to leave them at Vancouver.  In the forced association of their walks and rides, Elizabeth showed herself gay, kind, companionable; although often, and generally for no reason that he could discover, something sharp and icy in her would momentarily make itself felt, and he would find himself driven back within bounds that he had perhaps been tempted to transgress.  And the result of it all was that he fell day by day more tormentingly in love with her.  Those placid matrimonial ambitions with which he had left England had been all swept away; and as he followed her—­she on pony-back, he on foot—­along the mountain trails, watching the lightness of her small figure against the splendid background of peak and pine, he became a troubled, introspective person; concentrating upon himself and his disagreeable plight the attention he had hitherto given to a delightful outer world, sown with the caches of antiquity, in order to amuse him.

Meanwhile the situation in the cabin at Laggan appeared to be steadily improving.  McEwen had abruptly ceased to be a rebellious and difficult patient.  The doctor’s orders had been obeyed; the leg had healed rapidly; and he no longer threatened or cajoled Mrs. Ginnell on the subject of liquor.  As far as Anderson was concerned, he was generally sulky and uncommunicative.  But Anderson got enough out of him by degrees to be able to form a fairly complete idea of his father’s course of life since the false report of his death in the Yukon.  He realised an existence on the fringe of civilisation, with its strokes of luck neutralised by drink, and its desperate, and probably criminal, moments.  And as soon as his father got well enough to limp along the trails of the Laggan valley, the son noticed incidents which appeared to show that the old man, while playing the part of the helpless stranger, was by no means without acquaintance among the motley host of workmen that were constantly passing through.  The links of international trades unionism no doubt accounted for it.  But in McEwen’s case, the fraternity to which he belonged seemed to apply only to the looser and more disreputable elements among the emigrant throng.

But at the same time he had shown surprising docility in the matter of Anderson’s counsels.  All talk of the Idaho mine had dropped between them, as though by common consent.  Anderson had laid hands upon a young man, a Salvation Army officer in Vancouver, with whom his father consented to lodge for the next six weeks; and further arrangements were to be postponed till the end of that period.  Anderson hoped, indeed, to get his father settled there before Lady Merton moved from Lake Louise.  For in a few days now, the private car was to return from the coast, in order to take up the English party.

McEwen’s unexpected complaisance led to a great softening in Anderson’s feeling towards his father.  All those inner compunctions that haunt a just and scrupulous nature came freely into play.  And his evangelical religion—­for he was a devout though liberal-minded Presbyterian—­also entered in.  Was it possible that he might be the agent of his father’s redemption?  The idea, the hope, produced in him occasional hidden exaltations—­flights of prayer—­mystical memories of his mother—­which lightened what was otherwise a time of bitter renunciation, and determined wrestling with himself.