a and Anderson moved
under it, nobly seen and nobly felt.

This he half shrinkingly understood, and he repaid her with adoration,
and a wisely yielding mind. For her sake he was ready to do a hundred
things he had never yet thought of, reading, inquiring, observing, in
wider circles and over an ampler range. For as the New World, through
Anderson, worked on Elizabeth--so Europe, through Elizabeth, worked on
Anderson. And thus, from life to life, goes on the great
interpenetrating, intermingling flux of things!

It seemed as though the golden light could not die from the lake, though
midsummer was long past. And presently up into its midst floated the
moon, and as they watched the changing of the light upon the northern
snow-peaks, they talked of the vast undiscovered regions beyond, of the
valleys and lakes that no survey has ever mapped, and the rivers that
from the beginning of time have spread their pageant of beauty for the
heavens alone; then, of that sudden stir and uproar of human
life--prospectors, navvies, lumbermen--that is now beginning to be heard
along that narrow strip where the new line of the Grand Trunk Pacific is
soon to pierce the wilderness--yet another link in the girdling of the
world. And further yet, their fancy followed, ever northward--solitude
beyond solitude, desert beyond desert--till, in the Yukon, it lit upon
gold-seeking man, dominating, at last, a terrible and hostile earth,
which had starved and tortured and slain him in his thousands, before he
could tame her to his will.

And last--by happy reaction--it was the prairies again--their fruitful
infinity--and the emigrant rush from East and South.

"When we are old"--said Elizabeth softly, slipping her hand into
Anderson's--"will all this courage die out of us? Now--nothing of all
this vastness, this mystery frightens me. I feel a kind of insolent,
superhuman strength!--as if I--even I--could guide a plough, reap corn,
shoot rapids, 'catch a wild goat by the hair--and hurl my lances at
the sun!'"

"With this hand?" said Anderson, looking at it with a face of
amusement. But Elizabeth took no heed--except to slip the other hand
after it--both into the same shelter.

She pursued her thought, murmuring the words, the white lids falling
over her eyes:

"But when one is feeble and dying, will it all grow awful to me?
Suddenly--shall I long to creep into some old, old corner of England or
Italy--and feel round me close walls, and dim sm