"No, don't let us sentimentalise. We have our own future. It is not yours."
"But you are loyal!" The note was one of pain.
"Are we? Foolish word! Yes, we are loyal, as you are--loyal to a common ideal, a common mission in the world."
"To blood also--and to history?" Her voice was almost entreating. What he had said seemed to jar with other and earlier sayings of his, which had stirred in her a patriotic pleasure.
He smiled at her emotion--her implied reproach.
"Yes, we stand together. We march together. But Canada will have her own history; and you must not try to make it for her."
Their eyes met; in hers exaltion, in his a touch of sternness, a moment's revelation of the Covenanter in his soul.
Then as the delightful vision of her among the flowers, in her white dress, the mountains behind and around her, imprinted itself on his senses, he was conscious of a moment of intolerable pain. Between her and him--as it were--the abyss opened. The trembling waves of colour in the grass, the noble procession of the clouds, the gleaming of the snows, the shadow of the valleys--they were all wiped out. He saw instead a small unsavoury room--the cunning eyes and coarse mouth of his father. He saw his own future as it must now be; weighted with this burden, this secret; if indeed it were still to be a secret; if it were not rather the wiser and the manlier plan to have done with secrecy.
Elizabeth rose with a little shiver. The wind had begun to blow cold from the northwest.
"How soon can we run down? I hope Mr. Arthur will have sent Philip indoors."