not worry in the least about his digestion. He felt firm and strong. He gazed out of the window at the wooded ravines, at the dark blue hills and ridges slipping by. His eyes delighted in the vineyards, in the peach orchards, where thousands of little peach trees, white with bloom, marched above the rich red loam, dyed redder by the setting sun. The ground beneath the cherry trees was white with their lost petals. All the farmlands beamed and shone with promise.
The dark hand of the waiter taking up the tip pleased him, the faces of the other passengers interested. Round-faced, shrewd-looking New York business men, some of them. He thought rather ruefully: "Been looking after their interests in Canada, I suppose. . . . Well, if we haven't the initiative or capital to develop our own country, and if the Mother Country doesn't do it, why, there's nothing for it but to let the Americans undertake it."
In the smoking compartment he had a cigar. He would have liked to engage the man nearest him in conversation, but as soon as the man showed a disposition to talk Ernest looked down his nose with an expression of absorption. He could not talk to a stranger, much as he would have liked to discuss some of the great questions of the day with someone besides his family and his few intimates. Of the last there were really only two: Mr. Fennel, whose interests were centred in protecting his vegetable garden from insects and his parish from ritualism, which two elderly married ladies and a single young man were determined to introduce; and a Mr. Sinclair, the last survivor of another English family, whose father had also retired from the army and built a house five miles from Jalna. But as he lived alone, and so had no one to talk to, he came to his discussions with Ernest so full of explosive vitality that he left him exhausted, and as he believed nothing that was not in the London Times, and it was three weeks old when he got it, companionship with him had its limitations.
Ernest had travelled little in America, and had forgotten the dreadful publicity of the sleeping cars. He
