white where the chestnut blossoms
were dropping, and his eyes were just wistful enough to stir her
adoration--"and of heroism that is quite dateless in the history of the
human heart. At least one likes to hope so."

"I somehow think," she ventured timidly, "that yours would be classic."

Finlay withdrew his glance abruptly from the falling blossoms as if they
had tempted him to an expansion he could not justify. He was impatient
always of the personal note, and in his intercourse with Miss Murchison
he seemed of late to be constantly sounding it.

"Oh, I don't know," he said, almost irritably. "I only meant that I
see the obvious things, while you seem to have an eye for the subtle.
There's reward, I suppose, in seeing anything. But about those more
delicate appreciations of societies longer evolved, I sometimes think
that you don't half realize, in a country like this, how much there is
to make up."

"Is there anything really to make up?" she asked.

"Oh, so much! Freedom from old habits, inherited problems: look at the
absurd difficulty they have in England in handling such a matter as
education! Here you can't even conceive it--the schools have been on
logical lines from the beginning, or almost. Political activity over
there is half-strangled at this moment by the secular arm of religion;
here it doesn't even impede the circulation! Conceive any Church, or the
united Churches, for the matter of that, asking a place in the conduct
of the common schools of Ontario! How would the people take it? With
anger, or with laughter, but certainly with sense. 'By all mean let the
ministers serve education on the School Boards,' they would say, 'by
election like other people'--an opportunity, by the way, which has just
been offered to me. I'm nominated for East Elgin in place of Leverett,
the tanner, who is leaving the town. I shall do my best to get in, too;
there are several matters that want seeing to over there. The girls'
playground, for one thing, is practically under water in the spring."

"You should get in without the least difficulty. Oh, yes there is
something in a fresh start: we're on the straight road as a nation,
in most respects; we haven't any picturesque old prescribed lanes to
travel. So you think that makes up?"

"It's one thing. You might put down space--elbow-room."

"An empty horizon," Advena murmured.

"For faith and the future. An empty horizon is better than none. England
has filled hers up.