d 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.

Delaine tried to persuade Elizabeth to return to the car--in vain. He
himself returned thither for a warmer coat, and she and Anderson
walked on alone.

"The Rockies were fine!--but the Selkirks are superb!"

She smiled at him as she spoke, as though she thanked him personally for
the grandeur round them. Her slender form seemed to have grown in
stature and in energy. The mountain rain was on her fresh cheek and her
hair; a blue veil eddying round her head and face framed the brilliance
of her eyes. Those who had known Elizabeth in Europe would hardly have
recognised her here. The spirit of earth's wild and virgin places had
mingled with her spirit, and as she had grown in sympathy, so also she
had grown in beauty. Anderson looked at her from time to time in
enchantment, grudging every minute that passed. The temptation
strengthened to tell her his trouble. But how, or when?

As he turned to her he saw that she, too, was gazing at him with an
anxious, wistful expression, her lips parted as though to speak.

He bent over her.

"What was that?" exclaimed Elizabeth, looking round her.

They had passed beyond the station where the train was at rest. But the
sound of shouts pursued them. Anderson distinguished his own na