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 small 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.