She was indeed aware of him all the time.

She watched him secretly; watching herself, too, in the characteristic modern way.

But outwardly she was absorbed in talking with the guests.
The Chief Justice, roundly modelled, with a pink ball of a face set in white hair, had been half a century in Canada, and had watched the Northwest grow from babyhood.

He had passed his seventieth year, but Elizabeth noticed in the old men of Canada a strained expectancy, a buoyant hope, scarcely inferior to that of the younger generation.

There was in Sir Michael's talk no hint of a Nunc Dimittis; rather a passionate regret that life was ebbing, and the veil falling over a national spectacle so enthralling, so dramatic.
"Before this century is out we shall be a people of eighty millions, and within measurable time this plain of a thousand miles from here to the Rockies will be as thickly peopled as the plain of Lombardy." "Well, and what then ?" said a harsh voice in a French accent, interrupting the Chief Justice.
Arthur Delaine's face, turning towards the speaker, suddenly lightened, as though its owner said, "Ah! precisely." "The plain of Lombardy is not a Paradise," continued Mariette, with a laugh that had in it a touch of impatience.
"Not far off it," murmured Delaine, as he looked out on the vast field of wheat they were passing--a field two miles long, flat and green and bare as a billiard-table--and remembered the chestnuts and the looping vines, the patches of silky corn and spiky maize, and all the interlacing richness and broidering of the Italian plain.