o, in the
characteristic modern way. But outwardly she was absorbed in talking
with the guests.

The Chief Justice, roundly modelled, with a pink ball of a face set in
white hair, had been half a century in Canada, and had watched the
Northwest grow from babyhood. He had passed his seventieth year, but
Elizabeth noticed in the old men of Canada a strained expectancy, a
buoyant hope, scarcely inferior to that of the younger generation. There
was in Sir Michael's talk no hint of a Nunc Dimittis; rather a
passionate regret that life was ebbing, and the veil falling over a
national spectacle so enthralling, so dramatic.

"Before this century is out we shall be a people of eighty millions, and
within measurable time this plain of a thousand miles from here to the
Rockies will be as thickly peopled as the plain of Lombardy."

"Well, and what then?" said a harsh voice in a French accent,
interrupting the Chief Justice.

Arthur Delaine's face, turning towards the speaker, suddenly lightened,
as though its owner said, "Ah! precisely."

"The plain of Lombardy is not a Paradise," continued Mariette, with a
laugh that had in it a touch of impatience.

"Not far off it," murmured Delaine, as he looked out on the vast field
of wheat they were passing--a field two miles long, flat and green and
bare as a billiard-table--and remembered the chestnuts and the looping
vines, the patches of silky corn and spiky maize, and all the
interlacing richness and broidering of the Italian plain. His soul
rebelled against this naked new earth, and its bare new fortunes. All
very well for those who must live in it and make it. "Yet is there
better than it!"--lands steeped in a magic that has been woven for them
by the mere life of immemorial generations.

He murmured this to Elizabeth, who smiled.

"Their shroud?" she said, to tease him. "But Canada has on her wedding
garment!"

Again he asked himself what had come to her. She looked years younger
than when he had parted from her in England. The delicious thought shot
through him that his advent might have something to do with it.

He stooped towards her.

"Willy-nilly, your friends must like Canada!" he said, in her ear; "if
it makes you so happy."

He had no art of compliment, but the words were simple and sincere, and
Elizabeth grew suddenly rosy, to her own great annoyance. Before she
could reply, however, the Chief Justice had insisted on bringing her
back into the general convers