“I am sure they are,” cried Marjorie heartily.  “How wonderful the power of this country of yours to transform men!  It is a wonderful country, Canada.”

“That it is,” cried Kalman with enthusiasm.  “No man can tell, for no man knows the magnificence of its possibilities.  We have only skirted round the edge and scratched its surface.”

“It is a fine thing,” said Marjorie, “to have a country to be made, and it is fine to be a man and have a part in the making of it.”

“Yes,” agreed Kalman, “it is fine.”

“I envy you,” cried Marjorie with enthusiasm.

A shadow fell on Kalman’s face.  “I don’t know that you need to, after all.”

Then she said good-by, leaving him with heart throbbing and nerves tingling to his finger tips.  Ah, how dear she was!  What mad folly to think he could forget her!  Every glance of her eye, every tone in her soft Scotch voice, every motion of hand and body, how familiar they all were!  Like the faint elusive perfume from the clover fields of childhood, they smote upon his senses with intoxicating power.  Standing there tingling and trembling, he made one firm resolve.  Never would he see her again.  To-morrow he would make a long-planned trip to the city.  He dared not wait another day.  To-morrow?  No, that was Sunday.  He would spend one full happy day in that ravine seeking to recatch the emotions that had thrilled his boy’s heart on that great night five years ago, and having thus filled his heart, he would take his departure without seeing her again.

It was the custom of the people of the ranch to spend Sunday afternoon at the Mission.  So without a word even to French, calling his dogs, Captain and Queen, Kalman rode down the trail that led past the lake and toward the Night Hawk ravine.  By that same trail he had gone on that memorable afternoon, and though five years had passed, the thoughts, the imaginings of that day, were as freshly present with him as if it had been but yesterday.  And though they were the thoughts and imaginings of a mere boy, yet to-day they seemed to him good and worthy of his manhood.

Down the trail, well beaten now, through the golden poplars he rode, his dogs behind him, till he reached the pitch of the ravine.  There, where he had scrambled down, a bridle path led now.  It was very different, and yet how much remained unchanged.  There was the same glorious sun raining down his golden beams upon the yellow poplar leaves, the same air, sweet and genial, in him the same heart, and before him the same face, but sweeter it seemed, and eyes the same that danced with every sunbeam and lured him on.  He was living again the rapture of his boyhood’s first great passion.