hat.

"Jolly old place, isn't it?" said the young man civilly, seeing that the
stranger was studying the view. "It's to be hoped that Philip will keep
it up properly."

"He seems fond of it," said Anderson.

"Oh, yes! But you've got to be a big man to fill the position. However,
there's money enough. They're all rich--and they marry money."

Anderson murmured something inaudible, and the young man departed.

A little later Anderson and Elizabeth were seated together in the Red
Drawing Room. Mrs. Gaddesden, after a little perfunctory conversation
with the new-comer, had disappeared on the plea of letters to write. The
girl in white, the centre of a large party in the hall, was flirting to
her heart's content. Philip would have dearly liked to stay and flirt
with her himself; but his mother, terrified by his pallor and fatigue
after the exertion of the shoot, had hurried him off to take a warm bath
and rest before dinner. So that Anderson and Elizabeth were alone.

Conversation between them did not move easily. Elizabeth was conscious
of an oppression against which it seemed vain to fight. Up to the moment
of his sailing from Canada his letters had been frank and full, the
letters of a deeply attached friend, though with no trace in them of the
language of love. What change was it that the touch of English
ground--the sight of Martindale--had wrought? He talked with some
readiness of the early stages of his mission--of the kindness shown to
him by English public men, and the impressions of a first night in the
House of Commons. But his manner was constrained; anything that he said
might have been heard by all the world; and as their talk progressed,
Elizabeth felt a miserable paralysis descending on her own will. She
grew whiter and whiter. This old house in which they sat, with its
splendours and treasures, this environment of the past all about them
seemed to engulf and entomb them both. She had looked forward with a
girlish pleasure--and yet with a certain tremor--to showing Anderson her
old home, the things she loved and had inherited. And now it was as
though she were vulgarly conscious of wealth and ancestry as dividing
her from him. The wildness within her which found its scope and its
voice in Canada was here like an imprisoned stream, chafing in caverns
underground. Ah! it had been easy to defy the Old World in Canada, its
myriad voices and claims--the many-fingered magic with which an old
society plays on