"Not far off it," murmured Delaine, as he looked out on the vast field of wheat they were passing--a field two miles long, flat and green and bare as a billiard-table--and remembered the chestnuts and the looping vines, the patches of silky corn and spiky maize, and all the interlacing richness and broidering of the Italian plain. His soul rebelled against this naked new earth, and its bare new fortunes. All very well for those who must live in it and make it. "Yet is there better than it!"--lands steeped in a magic that has been woven for them by the mere life of immemorial generations.

He murmured this to Elizabeth, who smiled.

"Their shroud?" she said, to tease him. "But Canada has on her wedding garment!"

Again he asked himself what had come to her. She looked years younger than when he had parted from her in England. The delicious thought shot through him that his advent might. . . Read More