sweep the lake in winter, measuring her frail life against the
loneliness and boundlessness around her. No sign of man, save in the few
lights of these scattered stations; and yet, for long, her main
impression was one of exultation in man's power and skill, which bore
her on and on, safe, through the conquered wilderness.

Gradually, however, this note of feeling slid down into something much
softer and sadder. She became conscious of herself, and her personal
life; and little by little her exultation passed into yearning; her eyes
grew wet. For she had no one beside her with whom to share these secret
thoughts and passions--these fresh contacts with life and nature. Was it
always to be so? There was in her a longing, a "sehnsucht," for she
knew not what.

She could marry, of course, if she wished. There was a possibility in
front of her, of which she sometimes thought. She thought of it now,
wistfully and kindly; but it scarcely availed against the sudden
melancholy, the passion of indefinite yearning which had assailed her.

The night began to cloud rapidly. The moonlight died from the lake and
the coast. Soon a wind sprang up, lashing the young spruce and birch
growing among the charred wreck of the older forest, through which the
railway had been driven. Elizabeth went within, and she was no sooner in
bed than the rain came pelting on her window.

She lay sleepless for a long time, thinking now, not of the world
outside, or of herself, but of the long train in front of her, and its
freight of lives; especially of the two emigrant cars, full, as she had
seen at North Bay, of Galicians and Russian Poles. She remembered the
women's faces, and the babies at their breasts. Were they all asleep,