Oh! the freshness of the morning on Lake Louise! It was barely eight o'clock, yet Elizabeth Merton had already taken her coffee on the hotel verandah, and was out wandering by herself.

The hotel, which is nearly six thousand feet above the sea, had only just been opened for its summer guests, and Elizabeth and her party were its first inmates.

Anderson indeed had arranged their coming, and was to have brought them hither himself.

But on the night of the party's return to Laggan he had been hastily summoned by telegraph to a consultation of engineers on a difficult matter of railway grading in the Kootenay district.

Delaine, knocking at his door in the morning, had found him flown.