"hold-up," and his own connection with
it; partly because it had happened on the C.P.R.; still more because of
the prominence given to his name the day before.

He felt himself a disgraced man; and he had already put from him all
thought of a public career. Yet he wondered, not without self-contempt,
as he lay there in the broadening light, what it was in truth that made
the enormous difference between this Monday and the Monday before. His
father was dead, and had died in the very commission of a criminal act.
But all or nearly all that Anderson knew now about his character he had
known before this happened. The details given by the Nevada officers
were indeed new to him; but he had shrewdly suspected all along that the
record, did he know it, would be something like that. If such a
parentage in itself involves stain and degradation, the stain and
degradation had been always there, and the situation, looked at
philosophically, was no worse for the catastrophe which had intervened
between this week and last.

And yet it was of course immeasurably worse! Such is the "bubble
reputation"--the difference between the known and the unknown.

At nine o'clock a note was brought to his room:

"Will you breakfast with me in half an hour? You will find me
alone.

"E.M."

Before the clock struck the half-hour, Elizabeth was already waiting for
her guest, listening for every sound. She too had been awake half
the night.

When he came in she went up to him, with her quick-tripping step,
holding out both her hands; and he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

"I am so--so sorry!" was all she could say. He looked into her eyes,
and as her hands lay in his he stooped suddenly and kissed them. There
was a great piteousness in his expression, and she felt through every
nerve the humiliation and the moral weariness which oppressed him.
Suddenly she recalled that first moment of intimacy between them when he
had so brusquely warned her about Philip, and she had been wounded by
his mere strength and fearlessness; and it hurt her to realise the
contrast between that strength and this weakness.

She made him sit down beside her in the broad window of her little
sitting-room, which over-looked the winding valley with the famous loops
of the descending railway, and the moving light and shade on the forest;
and very gently and tenderly she made him tell her all the story from
first to last.

His shrinking passed away