radition as herself, well endowed, a scholar and a gentleman.
He would make a good brother for Philip. And heretofore she had seen him
on ground which had shown him to advantage; either at home or abroad,
during a winter at Rome--a spring at Florence.

Indeed, as they strolled about Winnipeg, he talked to her incessantly
about persons and incidents connected with the spring of the year
before, when they had both been in Rome.

"You remember that delicious day at Castel Gandolfo?--on the terrace of
the Villa Barberini? And the expedition to Horace's farm? You recollect
the little girl there--the daughter of the Dutch Minister? She's married
an American--a very good fellow. They've bought an old villa on
Monte Mario."

And so on, and so on. The dear Italian names rolled out, and the speaker
grew more and more animated and agreeable.

Only, unfortunately, Elizabeth's attention failed him. A motor car had
been lent them in the hospitable Canadian way; and as they sped through
and about the city, up the business streets, round the park, and the
residential suburb rising along the Assiniboine, as they plunged through
seas of black mud to look at the little old-fashioned Cathedral of St.
John, with its graveyard recalling the earliest days of the settlement,
Lady Merton gradually ceased even to pretend to listen to her companion.

"They have found some extremely jolly things lately at Porto D'Anzio--a
fine torso--quite Greek."

"Have they?" said Elizabeth, absently--"Have they?--And to think that in
1870, just a year or two before my father and mother married, there was
nothing here but an outpost in the wilderness!--a few scores of people!
One just _hears_ this country grow." She turned pensively away from the
tombstone of an old Scottish settler in the shady graveyard of St. John.

"Ah! but what will it grow to?" said Delaine, drily. "Is Winnipeg going
to be interesting?--is it going to _matter_?"

"Come and look at the Emigration Offices," laughed Elizabeth for answer.

And he found himself dragged through room after room of the great
building, and standing by while Elizabeth, guided by an official who
seemed to hide a more than Franciscan brotherliness under the aspects of
a canny Scot, and helped by an interpreter, made her way into the groups
of home-seekers crowding round the clerks and counters of the lower
room--English, Americans, Swedes, Dutchmen, Galicians, French Canadians.
Some men, indeed, who were actu