The artist—­puzzled by her flash-like change of moods, and by her manner as she spoke of the world beyond the canyon gates—­had no words to reply.  As he stood there,—­in that little glade where the light fell as in a quiet cathedral and the air trembled with the deep organ-tones of the distant waters—­holding in his hands the basket of leaves and ferns with its wild fruit, and looking at the beautiful girl who had brought her offering with the naturalness of a child of the mountains and the air of a woodland spirit,—­he again felt that the world he had always known was very far away.

The girl, too, was silent—­as though, by some subtle power, she knew his thoughts and did not wish to interrupt.

So still were they, that a wild bird—­darting through the screen of alder boughs—­stopped to swing on a limb above their heads, with a burst of wild-wood melody.  In the arroyo beyond the willow wall, a quail called his evening call, and was answered by his mate from the top of the bank under the mistletoe oak.  A pair of gray squirrels crept down the gray trunks of the trees and slipped around the granite boulder to drink at the spring; then scampered away again—­half in frolic, half in fright—­as they caught sight of the man and the maid.  As the squirrels disappeared, the girl laughed—­a low laugh of fellowship with the creatures of the wilderness—­in complete understanding of their humor.  Then—­as though following the path of a sunbeam—­two gorgeously brown and yellow winged butterflies came flitting through the draperies of virgin’s-bower, and floated in zigzag flight about the glade—­now high among the alder boughs; now low over the tops of the roses and berry-bushes; down to the fragrant mint at the water’s edge; and up again to the tops of the willows, as if to leave the glade; but only to return again to the vines that covered the bank, and to the flowers that, here and there, starred the grassy sward.

“Oh!”—­cried the girl impulsively, as the beautiful winged creatures disappeared at last,—­“if people could only be like that!  It’s so hard to be yourself in the world.  Everybody, there, seems trying to be something they are not.  No one dares to be just themselves.  Everything, up here, is so right—­so true—­so just what it is—­and down there, everything tries so hard to be just what it is not.  The world even sees so crooked that it can’t believe when a thing is just what it is.”

While watching the butterflies, she had turned away from the artist and, in following their flight with her eyes, had taken a few light steps that brought her into the open, grassy center of the glade.  With her face upturned to the opening in the foliage through which the butterflies had disappeared, she had spoken as if thinking aloud, rather than as addressing her companion.