gain."

CHAPTER VII

THE GIRL OF THE WOOD LOT

June, and the sun flooding with a golden shimmer a land of tawny
prairie, billowy hills, wooded valleys and mountain peaks white with
eternal snows, touching with silver a stream which, glacier-born,
hurled itself down mountain sides in fairy films of mist, rushed through
canyons in a mad torrent, hurried between hills in a swollen flood,
meandered along wide valleys in a full-lipped tide, lingered in a placid
lake in a bit of lowland banked with poplar bluffs, and so onward past
ranch-stead and homestead to the great Saskatchewan and Father Ocean,
prairie and hills, valleys and mountains, river and lake, making a
wonder world of light and warmth and colour and joyous life.

Two riders on rangey bronchos, followed by two Russian boarhounds,
climbed the trail that went winding up among the hills towards a height
which broke abruptly into a ridge of bare rock. Upon the ridge they
paused.

"There! Can you beat that? If so, where?" The lady swept her gauntletted
hand toward the scene below. Mrs. Waring-Gaunt was tall, strongly made,
handsome with that comeliness which perfect health and out-of-doors life
combine to give, her dark hair, dark flashing eyes, straight nose,
wide, full-lipped curving mouth, and a chin whose chiselled firmness
was softened but not weakened by a dimple, making a picture good to look
upon.

"There!" she cried again, "tell me, can you beat it?"

"Glorious! Sybil, utterly and splendidly glorious!" said her brother,
his eyes sweeping the picture below. "And you too, Sybil," he said,
turning his eyes upon her. "This country has done you well. By jove,
what a transformation from the white-faced, willowy--"

"Weedy," said she.

"Well, as it's no longer true, weedy--woman that faded out of London,
how many--eight years ago!"

"Ten years, ten long, glorious, splendid years."

"Ten years! Surely not ten!"

"Yes, ten beautiful years."

"I wish to God I had come with you then. I might have been--well, I
should have been saved some bumps and a ghastly cropper at last."

"'Cut it out,' Jack, as the boys say here. En avant! We never look back
in this land, but ever forward. Oh, now isn't this worth while?" Again
she swept her hand toward the scene below her. "Look at that waving
line in the east, that broad sweep; and here at our left, those great,
majestic things. I love them. I love every scar in their old grey faces.
They have been good f