Whether it was due to his own hints to Elizabeth, or to Anderson's chivalrous feeling, he did not know.

But he wrote every mail to Mrs.Gaddesden, discreetly, yet not without giving her some significant information; he did whatever small services were possible in the case of a man who went about Canada as a Johnny Head-in-air, with his mind in another hemisphere; and it was understood that he was to leave them at Vancouver.

In the forced association of their walks and rides, Elizabeth showed herself gay, kind, companionable; although often, and generally for no reason that he could discover, something sharp and icy in her would momentarily make itself felt, and he would find himself driven back within bounds that he had perhaps been tempted to transgress.

And the result of it all was that he fell day by day more tormentingly in love with her.

Those placid matrimonial ambitions with which he had left England had been all swept away; and as he followed her--she on pony-back, he on foot--along the mountain trails, watching the lightness of her small figure against the splendid background of peak and pine, he became a troubled, introspective person; concentrating upon himself and his disagreeable plight the attention he had hitherto given to a delightful outer world, sown with the _caches_ of antiquity, in order to amuse him.
Meanwhile the situation in the cabin at Laggan appeared to be steadily improving.