as a large fruit farm, but they can get no service; the fruit rots on
the ground; and the two women are worn to death."

"Aye," said Anderson gravely. "This country breeds life, but it also
devours it."

"I asked these two women--Englishwomen--if they wanted to go home, and
give it up. They fell upon me with scorn."

"And you?"

Elizabeth sighed.

"I admired them. But could I imitate them? I thought of the house at
home; of the old servants; how it runs on wheels; how pretty and--and
dignified it all is; everybody at their post; no drudgery, no disorder."

"It is a dignity that costs you dear," said Anderson almost roughly, and
with a change of countenance. "You sacrifice to it things a thousand
times more real, more human."

"Do we?" said Elizabeth; and then, with a drop in her voice: "Dear, dear
England!" She paused to take breath, and as she leant resting against a
tree he saw her expression change, as though a struggle passed
through her.

The trees had opened behind them, and they looked back over the lake,
the hotel, and the wide Laggan valley beyond. In all that valley, not a
sign of human life, but the line of the railway. Not a house, not a
village to be seen; and at this distance the forest appeared continuous,
till it died against the rock and snow of the higher peaks.

For the first time, Elizabeth was home-sick; for the first time she
shrank from a raw, untamed land where the House of Life is only now
rearing its walls and its roof-timbers, and all its warm furnishings,
its ornaments and hangings are still to add. She thought of the English
landscapes, of the woods and uplands round her Cumberland home; of the
old church, the embowered cottages, the lichened farms; the generations
of lives that have died into the soil, like the summer leaves of the
trees; of the ghosts to be felt in the air--ghosts of squire and
labourer and farmer, alive still in men and women of the present, as
they too will live in the unborn. Her heart went out to England; fled
back to it over the seas, as though renewing, in penitence, an
allegiance that had wavered. And Anderson divined it, in the yearning of
her just-parted lips, in the quivering, restrained sweetness of
her look.

His own heart sank. They resumed their walk, and presently the path grew
steeper. Some of it was rough-hewn in the rock, and encumbered by roots
of trees. Anderson held out a helping hand; her fingers slipped
willingly into it; her light weigh