With the basket of fish in his hand, Aaron King went slowly to camp; where, when Conrad Lagrange saw what the artist carried so carefully, explanations were in order.

Chapter XVIII

Sibyl Andres and the Butterflies

On the following day, the artist was putting away his things, at the close of the afternoon’s work, when the girl appeared.

The long, slanting bars of sunshine and the deepening shadows marked the lateness of the hour.  As he bent over his paint-box, the man was thinking with regret that she would not come—­that, perhaps, she would never come.  And at the thought that he might not see her again, an odd fear gripped his heart.  His thoughts were interrupted by a low, musical laugh; and he sprang to his feet, to search the glade with careful eyes.

“Come out,” he cried, as though adjuring an invisible spirit.  “I know you are here; come out.”

With another laugh, she stepped from behind the trunk of one of the largest trees, within a few feet of where he stood.  As she went toward him, she carried in her outstretched hands a graceful basket, woven of sycamore leaves and ferns, and filled with the ripest sweetest blackberries.  She did not speak as she held out her offering; but the man, looking into her laughing eyes, fancied that there was a meaning and a purpose in the gift that did not appear upon the surface of her simple action.

Expressing his pleasure, as he received the dainty basket, he could not refrain from adding, “But why do you bring me things?”

She answered with that wayward, mocking humor that so often seized her; “Because I like to.  I told you that I always do what I like—­up here in the mountains.”

“I hope you always will,” he returned, “if your likes are all as delicious as this one.”

With the manner of a child playfully making a mystery yet anxious to have the secret discussed, she said, “I have one more gift to bring you, yet.”

“I knew you meant something by your presents,” he cried.  “It isn’t just because you want me to have the things you bring.”

“Oh, yes it is,” she retorted, laughing mischievously at his triumphant and expectant tone.  “If I didn’t want you to have the things I bring—­why—­I wouldn’t bring them, would I?”

“But that isn’t all,” he insisted.  “Tell me—­why do you say you have one more gift to bring?”

She shook her head with a delightful air of mystery “Not until I come again.  When I come again, I will tell you.”

“And you will come to-morrow?”

She laughed teasingly at his eagerness.  “How can I tell?” she answered.  “I do not know, myself, what I will do to-morrow—­when I am up here in the mountains—­when the canyon gates are shut and the world is left outside.”  Even as she spoke, her mood changed and the last words were uttered wistfully, as a captive spirit—­that, by nature wild and free, was permitted, for a brief time only, to go beyond its prison walls—­might have spoken.