all rooms, and dear,
stuffy, familiar streets that thousands and thousands of feet have worn
before mine?"

Anderson smiled at her. He had guided their boat into a green cove where
there was a little strip of open ground between the water and the
forest. They made fast the boat, and Anderson found a mossy seat under a
tall pine from which the lightning of a recent storm had stripped a
great limb, leaving a crimson gash in the trunk. And there Elizabeth
nestled to him, and he with his arm about her, and the intoxication of
her slender beauty mastering his senses, tried to answer her as a plain
man may. The commonplaces of passion--its foolish promises--its blind
confidence--its trembling joy--there is no other path for love to travel
by, and Elizabeth and Anderson trod it like their fellows.

Six months later on a clear winter evening Elizabeth was standing in
the sitting-room of a Saskatchewan farmhouse. She looked out upon a
dazzling world of snow, lying thinly under a pale greenish sky in which
the sunset clouds were just beginning to gather. The land before her
sloped to a broad frozen river up which a wagon and a team of horses was
plodding its way--the steam rising in clouds round the bodies of the
horses and men. On a track leading to the river a sledge was
running--the bells jingling in the still, light air. To her left were
the great barns of the homestead, and beyond, the long low cowshed, with
a group of Shorthorns and Herefords standing beside the open door. Her
eyes delighted in the whiteness of the snow, or the touches of orange
and scarlet in the clumps of bush, in a note of crimson here and there,
among the withered reeds pushing through the snow, or in the thin
background of a few taller trees--the "shelter-belt" of the farm--rising
brown and sharp against the blue.

Within the farmhouse sitting-room flamed a great wood fire, which shed
its glow on the white walls, on the prints and photographs and books
which were still Elizabeth's companions in the heart of the prairies, as
they had been at Martindale. The room was simplicity itself, yet full
of charm, with its blue druggetting, its pale green chairs and
hangings. At its further end, a curtain half drawn aside showed another
room, a dining-room, also firelit--with a long table spread for tea, a
bare floor of polished woodblocks, and a few prints on the walls.

The wagon she had seen on the river approached the homestead. The man
who was driving it-