es?"

"Chances of the future."

"Hasn't got any chances!" said Philip Gaddesden, keeping his hands in
his pockets.

"Hasn't it? Owl!" Lady Merton neatly pinched the arm nearest to her. "As
I've explained to you many times before, this is the Hinterland of
Ontario--and it's only been surveyed, except just along the railway, a
few years ago--and it's as rich as rich--"

"I say, I wish you wouldn't reel out the guide-book like that!" grumbled
the somnolent person beside her. "As if I didn't know all about the
Cobalt mines, and that kind of stuff."

"Did you make any money out of them, Phil?"

"No--but the other fellows did. That's my luck."

"Never mind, there'll be heaps more directly--hundreds." She stretched
out her hand vaguely towards an enchanting distance--hill beyond hill,
wood beyond wood; everywhere the glimmer of water in the hollows;
everywhere the sparkle of fresh leaf, the shining of the birch trunks
among the firs, the greys and purples of limestone rock; everywhere,
too, the disfiguring stain of fire, fire new or old, written, now on the
mouldering stumps of trees felled thirty years ago when the railway was
making, now on the young stems of yesterday.

"I want to see it all in a moment of time," Elizabeth continued, still
above herself. "An air-ship, you know, Philip--and we should see it all
in a day, from here to James Bay. A thousand miles of it--stretched
below us--just waiting for man! And we'd drop down into an undiscovered
lake, and give it a name--one of our names--and leave a letter under a
stone. And then in a hundred years, when the settlers come, they'd find
it, and your name--or mine--would live forever."

"I forbid you to take any liberties with my name, Elizabeth! I've
something better to do with it than waste it on a lake in--what do you
call it?--the 'Hinterland of Ontario.'" The young man mocked his
sister's tone.

Elizabeth laughed and was silent.

The train sped on, at its steady pace of some thirty miles an hour. The
spring day was alternately sunny and cloudy; the temperature was warm,
and the leaves were rushing out. Elizabeth Merton felt the spring in her
veins, an indefinable joyousness and expectancy; but she was conscious
also of another intoxication--a heat of romantic perception kindled in
her by this vast new country through which she was passing. She was a
person of much travel, and many experiences; and had it been prophesied
to her a year before this date that