The party sat down on the grass beside the bright, rippling water, and Yerkes brought them coffee.  While they were taking it, the two engine-drivers descended from the cab of the engine and began to gather a few flowers and twigs from spring bushes that grew near.  They put them together and offered them to Lady Merton.  She, going to speak to them, found that they were English and North Country.

“Philip!—­Mr. Arthur!—­they come from our side of Carlisle!”

Philip looked up with a careless nod and smile.  Delaine rose and went to join her.  A lively conversation sprang up between her and the two men.  They were, it seemed, a stalwart pair of friends, kinsmen indeed, who generally worked together, and were now entrusted with some of the most important work on the most difficult sections of the line.  But they were not going to spend all their days on the line—­not they!  Like everybody in the West, they had their eyes on the land.  Upon a particular district of it, moreover, in Northern Alberta, not yet surveyed or settled.  But they were watching it, and as soon as the “steel gang” of a projected railway came within measurable distance they meant to claim their sections and work their land together.

When the conversation came to an end and Elizabeth, who with her companions had been strolling along the line a little in front of the train, turned back towards her party, Delaine looked down upon her, at once anxious to strike the right note, and moodily despondent of doing it.

“Evidently, two very good fellows!” he said in his rich, ponderous voice.  “You gave them a great pleasure by going to talk to them.”

“I?” cried Elizabeth.  “They are a perfect pair of gentlemen!—­and it is very kind of them to drive us!”

Delaine laughed uneasily.

“The gradations here are bewildering—­or rather the absence of gradations.”

“One gets down to the real thing,” said Elizabeth, rather hotly.

Delaine laughed again, with a touch of bitterness.

“The real thing?  What kind of reality?  There are all sorts.”

Elizabeth was suddenly conscious of a soreness in his tone.  She tried to walk warily.

“I was only thinking,” she protested, “of the chances a man gets in this country of showing what is in him.”

“Remember, too,” said Delaine, with spirit, “the chances that he misses!”

“The chances that belong only to the old countries?  I am rather bored with them!” said Elizabeth flippantly.

Delaine forced a smile.

“Poor Old World!  I wonder if you will ever be fair to it again, or—­or to the people bound up with it!”

She looked at him, a little discomposed, and said, smiling: 

“Wait till you meet me next in Rome!”

“Shall I ever meet you again in Rome?” he replied, under his breath, as though involuntarily.