But then from such women his own pride--his pride in his country--would have warned his passion.

It was to Elizabeth's lovely sympathy, her generous detachment, her free kindling mind--that his life had gone out.

_She_ would, surely, never be deterred from marrying a Canadian--if he pleased her--because it would cut her off from London and Paris, and all the ripe antiquities and traditions of English or European life?
Even in the sparsely peopled Northwest, with which his own future was bound up, how many English women are there--fresh, some of them, from luxurious and fastidious homes--on ranches, on prairie farms, in the Okanagan valley! "This Northwest is no longer a wilderness!" he proudly thought; "it is no longer a leap in the dark to bring a woman of delicate nurture and cultivation to the prairies." 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.