l. But we saw a great deal of each other. He used to come home
with me in his holidays."

"He told me something of his early life."

"Did he? It is a sad history, and I fear we--my family, that is, who are
so attached to him--have only made it sadder. Three years ago he was
engaged to my sister. Then the Archbishop forbade mixed marriages. My
sister broke it off, and now she is a nun in the Ursuline Convent
at Quebec."

"Oh, poor things!" cried Elizabeth, her eye on Anderson's distant face.

"My sister is quite happy," said Mariette sharply. "She did her duty.
But my poor friend suffered. However, now he has got over it. And I hope
he will marry. He is very dear to me, though we have not a single
opinion in the world in common."

Elizabeth kept him talking. The picture of Anderson drawn for her by the
admiring but always critical affection of his friend, touched and
stirred her. His influence at college, the efforts by which he had
placed his brothers in the world, the sensitive and generous temperament
which had won him friends among the French Canadian students, he
remaining all the time English of the English; the tendency to
melancholy--a personal and private melancholy--which mingled in him with
a passionate enthusiasm for Canada, and Canada's future; Mariette drew
these things for her, in a stately yet pungent French that affected her
strangely, as though the French of Saint Simon--or something like
it--breathed again from a Canadian mouth. Anderson meanwhile was
standing outside with the Chief Justice. She threw a glance at him now
and then, wondering about his love affair. Had he really got over
it?--or was that M. Mariette's delusion? She liked, on the contrary, to
think of him as constant and broken-hearted!

* * * * *

The car stopped, as it seemed, on the green prairie, thirty miles from
Winnipeg. Elizabeth was given up to the owner of the great farm--one of
the rich men of Canada for whom experiment in the public interest
becomes a passion; and Anderson walked on her other hand.

Delaine endured a wearisome half-hour. He got no speech with Elizabeth,
and prize cattle were his abomination. When the half-hour was done, he
slipped away, unnoticed, from the party. He had marked a small lake or
"slough" at the rear of the house, with wide reed-beds and a clump of
cottonwood. He betook himself to the cottonwood, took out his pocket
Homer and a notebook, and fell to his task