"

He and Anderson began some rapid technical talk. Slowly, they passed
over the quicksand which in the morning had engulfed half a train; amid
the flare of torches, and the murmur of strange speech, from the
Galician and Italian labourers, who rested on their picks and stared and
laughed, as they went safely by.

"How I love adventures!" cried Elizabeth, clasping her hands.

"Even little ones?" said the Canadian, smiling. But this time she was
not conscious of any note of irony in his manner, rather of a kind
protectingness--more pronounced, perhaps, than it would have been in an
Englishman, at the same stage of acquaintance. But Elizabeth liked it;
she liked, too, the fine bare head that the torchlight revealed; and the
general impression of varied life that the man's personality produced
upon her. Her sympathies, her imagination were all trembling towards the
Canadians, no less than towards their country.

CHAPTER III

"Mr. Delaine, sir?"

The gentleman so addressed turned to see the substantial form of Simpson
at his elbow. They were both standing in the spacious hall of the C.P.R.
Hotel adjoining the station at Winnipeg.

"Her ladyship, sir, asked me to tell you she would be down directly. And
would you please wait for her, and take her to see the place where the
emigrants come. She doesn't think Mr. Gaddesden will be down till
luncheon-time."

Arthur Delaine thanked the speaker for her information, and then sat
down in a comfortable corner, _Times_ in hand, to wait for Lady Merton.

She and her brother had arrived, he understood, in the early hours at
Winnipeg, after the agitations and perils of the sink-hole. Philip had
gone at once to bed and to slumber. Lady Merton would soon, it seemed,
be ready for anything that Winnipeg might have to show her.

The new-comer had time, however, to realise and enjoy a pleasant
expectancy before she appeared. He was apparently occupied with the
_Times_, but in reality he was very conscious all the time of his own
affairs and of a certain crisis to which, in his own belief, he had now
brought them. In the first place, he could not get over his astonishment
at finding himself where he was. The very aspect of the Winnipeg hotel,
as he looked curiously round it, seemed to prove to him both the
seriousness of certain plans and intentions of his own, and the unusual
decision with which he had been pursuing them.

For undoubtedly, of his own accord, and for mere trave