How foreign to an English eye was the flat, hedgeless landscape! with its vast satin-smooth fields of bluish-green wheat; its farmhouses with their ploughed fireguards and shelter-belts of young trees; its rare villages, each stretching in one long straggling line of wooden houses along the level earth; its scattered, treeless lakes, from which the duck rose as the train passed!  Was it this mere foreignness, this likeness in difference, that made it strike so sharply, with such a pleasant pungency on Elizabeth’s senses?  Or was it something else—­some perception of an opening future, not only for Canada but for herself, mingling with the broad light, the keen air, the lovely strangeness of the scene?

Yet she scarcely spoke to Arthur Delaine, with whom one might have supposed this hidden feeling connected.  She was indeed aware of him all the time.  She watched him secretly; watching herself, too, in the characteristic modern way.  But outwardly she was absorbed in talking with the guests.

The Chief Justice, roundly modelled, with a pink ball of a face set in white hair, had been half a century in Canada, and had watched the Northwest grow from babyhood.  He had passed his seventieth year, but Elizabeth noticed in the old men of Canada a strained expectancy, a buoyant hope, scarcely inferior to that of the younger generation.  There was in Sir Michael’s talk no hint of a Nunc Dimittis; rather a passionate regret that life was ebbing, and the veil falling over a national spectacle so enthralling, so dramatic.

“Before this century is out we shall be a people of eighty millions, and within measurable time this plain of a thousand miles from here to the Rockies will be as thickly peopled as the plain of Lombardy.”

“Well, and what then?” said a harsh voice in a French accent, interrupting the Chief Justice.

Arthur Delaine’s face, turning towards the speaker, suddenly lightened, as though its owner said, “Ah! precisely.”

“The plain of Lombardy is not a Paradise,” continued Mariette, with a laugh that had in it a touch of impatience.

“Not far off it,” murmured Delaine, as he looked out on the vast field of wheat they were passing—­a field two miles long, flat and green and bare as a billiard-table—­and remembered the chestnuts and the looping vines, the patches of silky corn and spiky maize, and all the interlacing richness and broidering of the Italian plain.  His soul rebelled against this naked new earth, and its bare new fortunes.  All very well for those who must live in it and make it.  “Yet is there better than it!”—­lands steeped in a magic that has been woven for them by the mere life of immemorial generations.

He murmured this to Elizabeth, who smiled.

“Their shroud?” she said, to tease him.  “But Canada has on her wedding garment!”

Again he asked himself what had come to her.  She looked years younger than when he had parted from her in England.  The delicious thought shot through him that his advent might have something to do with it.