That was her great gift.

She was the best of listeners.

Thus led on he could not help himself, any more than he had been able to help himself on the afternoon of the sink-hole.

He had meant to hold himself strictly in hand with this too attractive Englishwoman.

On the contrary, he had never yet poured out so frankly to mortal ear the inmost dreams and hopes which fill the ablest minds of Canada--dreams half imagination, half science; and hopes which, yesterday romance, become reality to-morrow.
He showed her, for instance, the great Government farms as they passed them, standing white and trim upon the prairie, and bade her think of the busy brains at work there--magicians conjuring new wheats that will ripen before the earliest frosts, and so draw onward the warm tide of human life over vast regions now desolate; or trees that will stand firm against the prairie winds, and in the centuries to come turn this bare and boundless earth, this sea-floor of a primeval ocean, which is now Western Canada, into a garden of the Lord.