Rockies will be as thickly peopled as the plain of Lombardy."

"Well, and what then?" said a harsh voice in a French accent,
interrupting the Chief Justice.

Arthur Delaine's face, turning towards the speaker, suddenly lightened,
as though its owner said, "Ah! precisely."

"The plain of Lombardy is not a Paradise," continued Mariette, with a
laugh that had in it a touch of impatience.

"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 have something to do with it.