As they went back to Winnipeg, some chance word revealed to Elizabeth that Anderson also was taking the night train for Calgary.
"Oh! then to-morrow you will come and talk to us!" cried Elizabeth, delighted.
Her cordial look, the pretty gesture of her head, evoked in Anderson a start of pleasure. He was not, however, the only spectator of them. Arthur Delaine, standing by, thought for the first time in his life that Elizabeth's manner was really a little excessive.
The car left Winnipeg that night for the Rockies. An old man, in a crowded emigrant car, with a bundle under his arm, watched the arrival of the Gaddesden party. He saw Anderson accost them on the platform, and then make his way to his own coach just ahead of them.
The train sped westwards through the Manitoba farms and villages. Anderson slept intermittently, haunted by various important affairs that were on his mind, and by recollections of the afternoon. Meanwhile, in the front of the train, the paragraph from the Winnipeg Chronicle lay carefully folded in an old tramp's waistcoat pocket.
CHAPTER V
"I say, Elizabeth, you're not going to sit out there all day, and get your death of cold? Why don't you come in and read a novel like a sensible woman?"
"Because I can read a novel at home--and I can't see Canada."
"See Canada! What is there to see?" The youth with the scornful voice came to lean against the doorway beside her. "A patch of corn--miles and miles of some withered stuff that calls itself grass, all of it as flat as your hand--oh! and, by Jove! a little brown fellow--gopher, is that their silly name?--scootling along the line. Go it, young 'un!" Philip shied the round end of a biscuit tin after the disappearing brown thing. "A boggy lake with a kind of salt fringe--unhealthy and horrid and beastly--a wretched farm building--et cetera, et cetera!"