“He told me something of his early life.”

“Did he?  It is a sad history, and I fear we—­my family, that is, who are so attached to him—­have only made it sadder.  Three years ago he was engaged to my sister.  Then the Archbishop forbade mixed marriages.  My sister broke it off, and now she is a nun in the Ursuline Convent at Quebec.”

“Oh, poor things!” cried Elizabeth, her eye on Anderson’s distant face.

“My sister is quite happy,” said Mariette sharply.  “She did her duty.  But my poor friend suffered.  However, now he has got over it.  And I hope he will marry.  He is very dear to me, though we have not a single opinion in the world in common.”

Elizabeth kept him talking.  The picture of Anderson drawn for her by the admiring but always critical affection of his friend, touched and stirred her.  His influence at college, the efforts by which he had placed his brothers in the world, the sensitive and generous temperament which had won him friends among the French Canadian students, he remaining all the time English of the English; the tendency to melancholy—­a personal and private melancholy—­which mingled in him with a passionate enthusiasm for Canada, and Canada’s future; Mariette drew these things for her, in a stately yet pungent French that affected her strangely, as though the French of Saint Simon—­or something like it—­breathed again from a Canadian mouth.  Anderson meanwhile was standing outside with the Chief Justice.  She threw a glance at him now and then, wondering about his love affair.  Had he really got over it?—­or was that M. Mariette’s delusion?  She liked, on the contrary, to think of him as constant and broken-hearted!

* * * * *

The car stopped, as it seemed, on the green prairie, thirty miles from Winnipeg.  Elizabeth was given up to the owner of the great farm—­one of the rich men of Canada for whom experiment in the public interest becomes a passion; and Anderson walked on her other hand.

Delaine endured a wearisome half-hour.  He got no speech with Elizabeth, and prize cattle were his abomination.  When the half-hour was done, he slipped away, unnoticed, from the party.  He had marked a small lake or “slough” at the rear of the house, with wide reed-beds and a clump of cottonwood.  He betook himself to the cottonwood, took out his pocket Homer and a notebook, and fell to his task.  He was in the thirteenth book: 

[Greek:  os d hot aner dorpoio lilaietai, o te pauemar neion an helketon boe oinope pekton arotron]

“As when a man longeth for supper, for whom, the livelong day, two wine-coloured oxen have dragged the fitted plough through the fallow, and joyful to such an one is the going down of the sun that sends him to his meal, for his knees tremble as he goes—­so welcome to Odysseus was the setting of the sun”:  ...

He lost himself in familiar joy—­the joy of the Greek itself, of the images of the Greek life.  He walked with the Greek ploughman, he smelt the Greek earth, his thoughts caressed the dark oxen under the yoke.  These for him had savour and delight; the wide Canadian fields had none.