cts of his unlucky _provenance_ to each other, and then the more
eagerly asked him to dinner.

Meanwhile, for Elizabeth life was one long debate, which left her often
at night exhausted and spiritless. The shock of their first meeting at
Martindale, when all her pent-up yearning and vague expectation had been
met and crushed by the silent force of the man's unaltered will, had
passed away. She understood him better. The woman who is beloved
penetrates to the fact through all the disguises that a lover may
attempt. Elizabeth knew well that Anderson had tones and expressions for
her that no other woman could win from him; and looking back to their
conversation at the Glacier House, she realised, night after night, in
the silence of wakeful hours, the fulness of his confession, together
with the strength of his recoil from any pretension to marry her.

Yes, he loved her, and his mere anxiety--now, and as things stood--to
avoid any extension or even repetition of their short-lived intimacy,
only betrayed the fact the more eloquently. Moreover, he had reason,
good reason, to think, as she often passionately reminded herself, that
he had touched her heart, and that had the course been clear, he might
have won her.

But--the course was not clear. From many signs, she understood how
deeply the humiliation of the scene at Sicamous had entered into a proud
man's blood. Others might forget; he remembered. Moreover, that sense of
responsibility--partial responsibility at least--for his father's guilt
and degradation, of which he had spoken to her at Glacier, had, she
perceived, gone deep with him. It had strengthened a stern and
melancholy view of life, inclining him to turn away from personal joy,
to an exclusive concern with public duties and responsibilities.

And this whole temper had no doubt been increased by his perception of
the Gaddesdens' place in English society. He dared not--he would
not--ask a woman so reared in the best that England had to give, now
that he understood what that best might be, to renounce it all in favour
of what he had to offer. He realised that there was a generous weakness
in her own heart on which he might have played. But he would not play;
his fixed intention was to disappear as soon as possible from her life;
and it was his honest hope that she would marry in her own world and
forget him. In fact he was the prey of a kind of moral terror that here
also, as in the case of his father, he might