things"--earthy, tender, humorous, or terrible--which make up
human fate.

Had he talked like this to the Catholic girl in Quebec? And yet she had
renounced him? She had never loved him, of course! To love this man
would be to cleave to him.

Once, in a lifting of the shadows of the prairie, Elizabeth saw a group
of antelope standing only a few hundred yards from the train, tranquilly
indifferent, their branching horns clear in a pallid ray of light; and
once a prairie-wolf, solitary and motionless; and once, as the train
moved off after a stoppage, an old badger leisurely shambling off the
line itself. And once, too, amid a driving storm-shower, and what seemed
to her unbroken formless solitudes, suddenly, a tent by the railway
side, and the blaze of a fire; and as the train slowly passed, three
men--lads rather--emerging to laugh and beckon to it. The tent, the
fire, the gay challenge of the young faces and the English voices,
ringed by darkness and wild weather, brought the tears back to
Elizabeth's eyes, she scarcely knew why.

"Settlers, in their first year," said Anderson, smiling, as he waved
back again.

But, to Elizabeth, it seemed a parable of the new Canada.

An hour later, amid a lightening of the clouds over the West, that
spread a watery gold over the prairie, Anderson sprang to his feet.

"The Rockies!"

And there, a hundred miles away, peering over the edge of the land, ran
from north to south a vast chain of snow peaks, and Elizabeth saw at
last that even the prairies have an end.

The car was shunted at Calgary, in order that its occupants might enjoy
a peaceful night. When she found herself alone in her tiny room,
Elizabeth stood for a while before her reflection in the glass. Her eyes
were frowning and distressed; her cheeks glowed. Arthur Delaine, her old
friend, had bade her a cold good night, and she knew well enough
that--from him--she deserved it. "Yet I gave him the whole morning," she
pleaded with herself. "I did my best. But oh, why, why did I ever let
him come!"

And even in the comparative quiet of the car at rest, she could not
sleep; so quickened were all her pulses, and so vivid the memories
of the day.

CHAPTER VI

Arthur Delaine was strolling and smoking on the broad wooden balcony,
which in the rear of the hotel at Banff overlooks a wide scene of alp
and water. The splendid Bow River comes swirling past the hotel, on its
rush from the high mountains to the plains o