"

So, only a few hours before, he might have flattered the tyranny of
longing and desire which had taken hold upon him.

But now! All his life seemed besmirched. His passion had been no sooner
born than, like a wounded bird, it fluttered to the ground. Bring upon
such a woman as Elizabeth Merton the most distant responsibility for
such a being as he had left behind him in the log-hut at Laggan? Link
her life in however remote a fashion with that life? Treachery and
sacrilege, indeed! No need for Delaine to tell him that! His father as a
grim memory of the past--that Lady Merton knew. His own origins--his own
story--as to that she had nothing to discover. But the man who might
have dared to love her, up to that moment in the hut, was now a slave,
bound to a corpse--

_Finis_!

And then as the anguish of the thought swept through him, and by a
natural transmission of ideas, there rose in Anderson the sore and
sudden memory of old, unhappy things, of the tender voices and faces of
his first youth. The ugly vision of his degraded father had brought back
upon him, through a thousand channels of association, the recollection
of his mother. He saw her now--the worn, roughened face, the sweet
swimming eyes; he felt her arms around him, the tears of her long agony
on his face. She had endured--he too must endure. Close, close--he
pressed her to his heart. As the radiant image of Elizabeth vanished
from him in the darkness, his mother--broken, despairing, murdered in
her youth--came to him and strengthened him. Let him do his duty to this
poor outcast, as she would have done it--and put high thoughts from him.

He tore himself resolutely from his trance of thought, and began to walk
back along the line. All the same, he would go up to Lake Louise, as he
had promised, on the following morning. As far as his own intention was
concerned, he would not cease to look after Lady Merton and her
brother; Philip Gaddesden would soon have to be moved, and he meant to
escort them to Vancouver.

Sounds approached, from the distance--the "freight," with the doctor,
climbing the steep pass. He stepped on briskly to a signal-man's cabin
and made arrangements to stop the train.

It was towards midnight when he and the doctor emerged from the
Ginnell's cabin.

"Oh, I daresay we'll heal those cuts," said the doctor. "I've told Mrs.
Ginnell what to do; but the old fellow's in a pretty cranky state. I
doubt whether he'll trouble the world