Or from the epic of the soil, he would slip on to the human epic bound up with it--tale after tale of life in the ranching country, and of the emigration now pouring into Alberta--witched out of him by this delicately eager face, these lovely listening eyes.

And here, in spite of his blunt, simple speech, came out the deeper notes of feeling, feeling richly steeped in those "mortal things"-- earthy, tender, humorous, or terrible--which make up human fate.
Had he talked like this to the Catholic girl in Quebec?
And yet she had renounced him?
She had never loved him, of course! To love this man would be to cleave to him.
Once, in a lifting of the shadows of the prairie, Elizabeth saw a group of antelope standing only a few hundred yards from the train, tranquilly indifferent, their branching horns clear in a pallid ray of light; and once a prairie-wolf, solitary and motionless; and once, as the train moved off after a stoppage, an old badger leisurely shambling off the line itself.

And once, too, amid a driving storm-shower, and what seemed to her unbroken formless solitudes, suddenly, a tent by the railway side, and the blaze of a fire; and as the train slowly passed, three men--lads rather--emerging to laugh and beckon to it.

The tent, the fire, the gay challenge of the young faces and the English voices, ringed by darkness and wild weather, brought the tears back to Elizabeth's eyes, she scarcely knew why.
"Settlers, in their first year," said Anderson, smiling, as he waved back again.
But, to Elizabeth, it seemed a parable of the new Canada.
An hour later, amid a lightening of the clouds over the West, that spread a watery gold over the prairie, Anderson sprang to his feet.
"The Rockies!" And there, a hundred miles away, peering over the edge of the land, ran from north to south a vast chain of snow peaks, and Elizabeth saw at last that even the prairies have an end.
The car was shunted at Calgary, in order that its occupants might enjoy a peaceful night.

When she found herself alone in her tiny room, Elizabeth stood for a while before her reflection in the glass.