nspoilt 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.

He was well aware indeed that in the case of many women sprung from the
English governing class, the ties that bind them to their own world, its
traditions, and its outlook, are so strong that to try and break them
would be merely to invite disaster. But then from such women his own
pride--his pride in his country--would have warned his passion. It was
to Elizabeth's lovely sympathy, her generous detachment, her free
kindling mind--that his life had gone out. _She_ would, surely, never be
deterred from marrying a Canadian--if he pleased her--because it would
cut her off from London and Paris, and all the ripe antiquities and
traditions of English or European life? Even in the sparsely peopled
Northwest, with which his own future was bound up, how many English
women are there--fresh, some of them, from luxurious and fastidious
homes--on ranches, on prairie farms, in the Okanagan valley! "This
Northwest is no longer a wilderness!" he proudly thought; "it is no
longer a leap in the dark to bring a woman of delicate nurture and
cultivation to the prairies.