“Ah! but you don’t know the country,” said Lady Merton gently.  “Don’t you feel that we must get the natives to guide us—­to put us in the way?  It is only they who can really feel the poetry of it all.”

Her face kindled.  Arthur Delaine, who thought that her remark was one of the foolish exaggerations of nice women, was none the less conscious as she made it, that her appearance was charming—­all indeed that a man could desire in a wife.  Her simple dress of white linen, her black hat, her lovely eyes, and little pointed chin, the bunch of white trilliums at her belt, which a child in the emigrant car had gathered and given her the day before—­all her personal possessions and accessories seemed to him perfection.  Yes!—­but he meant to go slowly, for both their sakes.  It seemed fitting and right, however, at this point that he should express his great pleasure and gratitude in being allowed to join them.  Elizabeth replied simply, without any embarrassment that could be seen.  Yet secretly both were conscious that something was on its trial, and that more was in front of them than a mere journey through the Rockies.  He was an old friend both of herself and her family.  She believed him to be honourable, upright, affectionate.  He was of the same world and tradition as herself, well endowed, a scholar and a gentleman.  He would make a good brother for Philip.  And heretofore she had seen him on ground which had shown him to advantage; either at home or abroad, during a winter at Rome—­a spring at Florence.

Indeed, as they strolled about Winnipeg, he talked to her incessantly about persons and incidents connected with the spring of the year before, when they had both been in Rome.

“You remember that delicious day at Castel Gandolfo?—­on the terrace of the Villa Barberini?  And the expedition to Horace’s farm?  You recollect the little girl there—­the daughter of the Dutch Minister?  She’s married an American—­a very good fellow.  They’ve bought an old villa on Monte Mario.”

And so on, and so on.  The dear Italian names rolled out, and the speaker grew more and more animated and agreeable.

Only, unfortunately, Elizabeth’s attention failed him.  A motor car had been lent them in the hospitable Canadian way; and as they sped through and about the city, up the business streets, round the park, and the residential suburb rising along the Assiniboine, as they plunged through seas of black mud to look at the little old-fashioned Cathedral of St. John, with its graveyard recalling the earliest days of the settlement, Lady Merton gradually ceased even to pretend to listen to her companion.

“They have found some extremely jolly things lately at Porto D’Anzio—­a fine torso—­quite Greek.”

“Have they?” said Elizabeth, absently—­“Have they?—­And to think that in 1870, just a year or two before my father and mother married, there was nothing here but an outpost in the wilderness!—­a few scores of people!  One just hears this country grow.”  She turned pensively away from the tombstone of an old Scottish settler in the shady graveyard of St. John.