And he heard Mary Josephine's voice, joyously suppressed, exclaiming
softly,
"Oh, Derry!"
His heart was filled with gladness. She, too, was seeing what his eyes
saw in that wonderland. And she was feeling it. Her hand, seeking his
hand, crept into his palm, and the fingers of it clung to his fingers.
He could feel the thrill of the miracle passing through her, the
miracle of the open spaces, the miracle of the forests rising billow on
billow to the purple mists of the horizon, the miracle of the golden
Saskatchewan rolling slowly and peacefully in its slumbering sheen out
of that mighty mysteryland that reached to the lap of the setting sun.
He spoke to her of that land as she looked, wide-eyed, quick-breathing,
her fingers closing still more tightly about his. This was but the
beginning of the glory of the west and the north, he told her. Beyond
that low horizon, where the tree tops touched the sky were the
prairies--not the tiresome monotony which she had seen from the car
windows, but the wide, glorious, God-given country of the Northwest
with its thousands of lakes and rivers and its tens of thousands of
square miles of forests; and beyond those things, still farther, were
the foothills, and beyond the foothills the mountains.
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