“Did you make any money out of them, Phil?”

“No—­but the other fellows did.  That’s my luck.”

“Never mind, there’ll be heaps more directly—­hundreds.”  She stretched out her hand vaguely towards an enchanting distance—­hill beyond hill, wood beyond wood; everywhere the glimmer of water in the hollows; everywhere the sparkle of fresh leaf, the shining of the birch trunks among the firs, the greys and purples of limestone rock; everywhere, too, the disfiguring stain of fire, fire new or old, written, now on the mouldering stumps of trees felled thirty years ago when the railway was making, now on the young stems of yesterday.

“I want to see it all in a moment of time,” Elizabeth continued, still above herself.  “An air-ship, you know, Philip—­and we should see it all in a day, from here to James Bay.  A thousand miles of it—­stretched below us—­just waiting for man!  And we’d drop down into an undiscovered lake, and give it a name—­one of our names—­and leave a letter under a stone.  And then in a hundred years, when the settlers come, they’d find it, and your name—­or mine—­would live forever.”

“I forbid you to take any liberties with my name, Elizabeth!  I’ve something better to do with it than waste it on a lake in—­what do you call it?—­the ‘Hinterland of Ontario.’” The young man mocked his sister’s tone.

Elizabeth laughed and was silent.

The train sped on, at its steady pace of some thirty miles an hour.  The spring day was alternately sunny and cloudy; the temperature was warm, and the leaves were rushing out.  Elizabeth Merton felt the spring in her veins, an indefinable joyousness and expectancy; but she was conscious also of another intoxication—­a heat of romantic perception kindled in her by this vast new country through which she was passing.  She was a person of much travel, and many experiences; and had it been prophesied to her a year before this date that she could feel as she was now feeling, she would not have believed it.  She was then in Rome, steeped in, ravished by the past—­assisted by what is, in its way, the most agreeable society in Europe.  Here she was absorbed in a rushing present; held by the vision of a colossal future; and society had dropped out of her ken.  Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa had indeed made themselves pleasant to her; she had enjoyed them all.  But it was in the wilderness that the spell had come upon her; in these vast spaces, some day to be the home of a new race; in these lakes, the playground of the Canada of the future; in these fur stations and scattered log cabins; above all in the great railway linking east and west, that she and her brother had come out to see.