thin herself
surprised and startled her; not so much, as yet, in connection with
persons, as with ideas, causes--oppressions, injustices, helpless
suffering; or, as now, with a new nation, visibly striking its "being
into bounds."

During her widowhood she had lived much with her mother, and had devoted
herself particularly to this only brother, a delicate lad--lovable,
self-indulgent and provoking--for whom the unquestioning devotion of
two women had not been the best of schools. An attack of rheumatic fever
which had seized him on leaving Christchurch had scared both mother and
sister. He had recovered, but his health was not yet what it had been;
and as at home it was impossible to keep him from playing golf all day,
and bridge all night, the family doctor, in despair, recommended travel,
and Elizabeth had offered to take charge of him. It was not an easy
task, for although Philip was extremely fond of his sister, as the male
head of the family since his father's death he held strong convictions
with regard to the natural supremacy of man, and would probably never
"double Cape Turk." In another year's time, at the age of four and
twenty, he would inherit the family estate, and his mother's
guardianship would come to an end. He then intended to be done with
petticoat government, and to show these two dear women a thing or two.

* * * * *

The dinner was good, as usual; in Elizabeth's eyes, monstrously good.
There was to her something repellent in such luxurious fare enjoyed by
strangers, on this tourist-flight through a country so eloquent of man's
hard wrestle with rock and soil, with winter and the wilderness. The
blinds of the car towards the next carriage were rigorously closed,
that no one might interfere with the privacy of the rich; but Elizabeth
had drawn up the blind beside her, and looked occasionally into the
evening, and that endless medley of rock and forest and lake which lay
there outside, under the sunset. Once she gazed out upon a great gorge,
through which ran a noble river, bathed in crimson light; on its way, no
doubt, to Lake Superior, the vast, crescent-shaped lake she had dreamed
of in her school-room days, over her geography lessons, and was soon to
see with her own eyes. She thought of the uncompanioned beauty of the
streams, as it would be when the thunder of the train had gone by, of
its distant sources in the wild, and the loneliness of its long, long
journ