ew wet. For she had no one beside her with whom to share these secret
thoughts and passions--these fresh contacts with life and nature. Was it
always to be so? There was in her a longing, a "sehnsucht," for she
knew not what.

She could marry, of course, if she wished. There was a possibility in
front of her, of which she sometimes thought. She thought of it now,
wistfully and kindly; but it scarcely availed against the sudden
melancholy, the passion of indefinite yearning which had assailed her.

The night began to cloud rapidly. The moonlight died from the lake and
the coast. Soon a wind sprang up, lashing the young spruce and birch
growing among the charred wreck of the older forest, through which the
railway had been driven. Elizabeth went within, and she was no sooner in
bed than the rain came pelting on her window.

She lay sleepless for a long time, thinking now, not of the world
outside, or of herself, but of the long train in front of her, and its
freight of lives; especially of the two emigrant cars, full, as she had
seen at North Bay, of Galicians and Russian Poles. She remembered the
women's faces, and the babies at their breasts. Were they all asleep,
tired out perhaps by long journeying, and soothed by the noise of the
train? Or were there hearts among them aching for some poor hovel left
behind, for a dead child in a Carpathian graveyard?--for a lover?--a
father?--some bowed and wrinkled Galician peasant whom the next winter
would kill? And were the strong, swarthy men dreaming of wealth, of the
broad land waiting, the free country, and the equal laws?

* * * * *

Elizabeth awoke. It was light in her little room. The train was at a
standstill. Winnipeg?

A subtle sense of something wrong stole upon her. Why this murmur of
voices round the train? She pushed aside a corner of the blind beside
her. Outside a railway cutting, filled with misty rain--many persons
walking up and down, and a babel of talk--

Bewildered, she rang for her maid, an elderly and precise person who
had accompanied her on many wanderings.

"Simpson, what's the matter? Are we near Winnipeg?"

"We've been standing here for the last two hours, my lady. I've been
expecting to hear you ring long ago."

Simpson's tone implied that her mistress had been somewhat crassly
sleeping while more sensitive persons had been awake and suffering.

Elizabeth rubbed her eyes. "But what's wrong, Simpson, and wher