ust warn you. You're losing your head."

"I lost it long ago. To-day I am a bore--to-morrow I shall be a
nuisance. Make up your mind to it."

"I thought you were a reasonable person!--you used to be. Now look at
that view, Elizabeth. We've seen the same thing for twelve hours, and if
it wasn't soon going to be dark we should see the same thing for twelve
hours more. What is there to go mad over in that?" Her brother waved
his hand indignantly from right to left across the disappearing scene.
"As for me, I am only sustained by the prospect of the good dinner that
I know Yerkes means to give us in a quarter of an hour. I won't be a
minute late for it! Go and get ready, Elizabeth--"

"Another lake!" cried Lady Merton, with a jump. "Oh, what a darling!
That's the twentieth since tea. Look at the reflections--and that
delicious island! And oh! what _are_ those birds?"

She leant over the side of the observation platform, attached to the
private car in which she and her brother were travelling, at the rear of
the heavy Canadian Pacific train. To the left of the train a small blue
lake had come into view, a lake much indented with small bays running up
among the woods, and a couple of islands covered with scrub of beech and
spruce, set sharply on the clear water. On one side of the lake, the
forest was a hideous waste of burnt trunks, where the gaunt
stems--charred or singed, snapped or twisted, or flayed--of the trees
which remained standing rose dreadfully into the May sunshine, above a
chaos of black ruin below. But except for this blemish--the only sign of
man--the little lake was a gem of beauty. The spring green clothed its
rocky sides; the white spring clouds floated above it, and within it;
and small beaches of white pebbles seemed to invite the human feet which
had scarcely yet come near them.

"What does it matter?" yawned her brother. "I don't want to shoot them.
And why you make such a fuss about the lakes, when, as you say yourself,
there are about two a mile, and none of them has got a name to its back,
and they're all exactly alike, and all full of beastly mosquitoes in the
summer--it beats me! I wish Yerkes would hurry up." He leant back
sleepily against the door of the car and closed his eyes.

"It's _because_ they haven't got a name--and they're so endless!--and
the place is so big!--and the people so few!--and the chances are so
many--and so queer!" said Elizabeth Merton laughing.

"What sort of chanc