“On one Sunday morning there was nothing—­the bare prairie; by the next—­so to speak—­there was a town all complete, with a hotel, an elevator, a bank, and a church.  That was ten years ago.  Then the railway came; I saw the first train come in, garlanded and wreathed with flowers.  Now there are eight thousand people.  They have reserved land for a park along the river, and sent for a landscape gardener from England to lay it out; they have made trees grow on the prairie; they have built a high school and a concert hall; the municipality is full of ambitions; and all round the town, settlers are pouring in.  On market day you find yourself in a crowd of men, talking cattle and crops, the last thing in binders and threshers, as farmers do all over the world.  But yet you couldn’t match that crowd in the old world.”

“Which you don’t know,” put in Elizabeth, with her sly smile.

“Which I don’t know,” repeated Anderson meekly.  “But I guess.  And I am thinking of sayings of yours.  Where in Europe can you match the sense of boundlessness we have here—­boundless space, boundless opportunity?  It often makes fools of us:  it intoxicates, turns our heads.  There is a germ of madness in this Northwest.  I have seen men destroyed by it.  But it is Nature who is the witch.  She brews the cup.”

“All very well for the men,” Elizabeth said, musing—­“and the strong men.  About the women in this country I can’t make up my mind.”

“You think of the drudgery, the domestic hardships?”

“There are some ladies in the hotel, from British Columbia.  They are in easy circumstances—­and the daughter is dying of overwork!  The husband has a large fruit farm, but they can get no service; the fruit rots on the ground; and the two women are worn to death.”

“Aye,” said Anderson gravely.  “This country breeds life, but it also devours it.”

“I asked these two women—­Englishwomen—­if they wanted to go home, and give it up.  They fell upon me with scorn.”

“And you?”

Elizabeth sighed.

“I admired them.  But could I imitate them?  I thought of the house at home; of the old servants; how it runs on wheels; how pretty and—­and dignified it all is; everybody at their post; no drudgery, no disorder.”

“It is a dignity that costs you dear,” said Anderson almost roughly, and with a change of countenance.  “You sacrifice to it things a thousand times more real, more human.”

“Do we?” said Elizabeth; and then, with a drop in her voice:  “Dear, dear England!” She paused to take breath, and as she leant resting against a tree he saw her expression change, as though a struggle passed through her.

The trees had opened behind them, and they looked back over the lake, the hotel, and the wide Laggan valley beyond.  In all that valley, not a sign of human life, but the line of the railway.  Not a house, not a village to be seen; and at this distance the forest appeared continuous, till it died against the rock and snow of the higher peaks.