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—­a strong-limbed, fair-haired fellow—­lifted his cap when he saw Elizabeth at the window.  She nodded and smiled at him.  He was Edward Tyson, one of the two engine-drivers who had taken her and Philip through the Kicking Horse Pass.  His friend also could be seen standing among the cattle gathered in the farmyard.  They had become Anderson’s foremen and partners on his farm of twelve hundred acres, of which only some three hundred acres had been as yet brought under plough.  The rest was still virgin prairie, pasturing a large mixed herd of cattle and horses.  The two North-Countrymen had been managing it all in Anderson’s Parliamentary absences, and were quite as determined as he to make it a centre of science and progress for a still remote and sparely peopled district.  One of the kinsmen was married, and lived in a small frame house, a stone’s throw from the main buildings of the farm.  The other was the head of the “bothy” or boarding-house for hired men, a long low building, with cheerful white-curtained windows, which could be seen just beyond the cow-house.