"I am glad. I shall like to assure him that his name was not mentioned--he was not involved at all!"
Elizabeth's lip curled a little, but she said nothing. During the preceding forty-eight hours there had been passages between herself and Delaine that she did not intend Anderson to know anything about. In his finical repugnance to soiling his hands with matters so distasteful, Delaine had carried out the embassy which Anderson had perforce entrusted to him in such a manner as to rouse in Elizabeth a maximum of pride on her own account, and of indignation on Anderson's. She was not even sorry for him any more; being, of course, therein a little unjust to him, as was natural to a high-spirited and warm-hearted woman.
Anderson, meanwhile, went off to knock at Philip's door, and Philip's sister was left behind to wonder nervously how Philip would behave and what he would say. She was still smarting under the boy's furious outburst of the night before when, through a calculated indiscretion of Delaine's, the notion that Anderson had presumed and might still presume to set his ambitions on Elizabeth had been presented to him for the first time.
"My sister marry a mining engineer!--with a drunken old robber for a father! By Jove! Anybody talking nonsense of that kind will jolly well have to reckon with me! Elizabeth!--you may say what you like, but I am the head of the family!"
Anderson found the head of the family in bed, surrounded by novels, and a dozen books on big-game shooting in the Rockies. Philip received him with an evident and ungracious embarrassment.
"I am awfully sorry--beastly business. Hard lines on you, of course--very. Hope they'll get the men."
"Thank you. They are doing their best."
Anderson sat down beside the lad. The fragility of his look struck him painfully, and the pathetic contrast between it and the fretting spirit--the books of travel and adventure heaped round him.
"Have you been ill again?" he asked in his kind, deep voice.
"Oh, just a beastly chill. Elizabeth would make me take too many wraps. Everyone knows you oughtn't to get overheated walking."