“And to-day”—­she finished simply—­“to-day I have brought you the beauty of the hills.”

“You have brought me more than the strength and purity and beauty of the mountains,” exclaimed the painter.  “You have brought me their mystery.”

She looked at him questioningly.

“In your own beautiful self,” he continued sincerely “you have brought me the mystery of these hills.  You are wonderful!  I have never known any one like you.”

She was wholly unconscious of the compliment—­if indeed, he meant it as such.  “I suppose I must be different,” she returned with just a touch, of sadness in her voice.  “You see I have never been taught like other girls.  I know nothing at all of the world where you live—­except what Myra has told me.”  Then, as if to change the subject, she asked shyly, “Would you care for my music to-day?”

He assented eagerly—­thinking she meant to sing.  But, rising, she crossed the glade, and disappeared behind the willows—­returning, a moment later, with her violin.

In answer to his exclamation of pleased surprise, she said smiling, “I brought my violin because I thought, if you would let me play, the music would perhaps help us both to forget what—­what happened when I danced.”

Standing by the gray boulder, with her face up turned to the mountains, she placed the instrument under her chin and drew the bow softly across the strings.

For an hour or more she played.  Then, as Czar trotted sedately into the glade, she lowered her instrument and, with a smile, called merrily to Conrad Lagrange who, attracted by the music, was standing at the gate on the bank—­from the artist’s position invisible; “Come down, good genie,—­come down!  You have been watching there quite long enough.  Come, instantly; or with my magic I’ll turn you into a fantastic, dancing bug, such as those that straddle there upon the waters of the spring, or else into a fat pollywog that wiggles in the black ooze among the dead leaves and rotting bits of wood.”

With a quick movement, she tucked her violin under her chin and played a few measures of the worst sort of ragtime, in perfect imitation of a popular performer.  The effect, following the music she had just been making, was grotesque and horrible.

“Mercy, mercy!” cried the man at the gate.  “I beg!  I beg!  Do not, I pray, good nymph, torture me with thy dreadful power.  I swear that I will obey thy every wish and whim.”

Pointing with her bow—­as with a wand—­to the boulder, she sternly commanded, “Come, then, and sit here upon this rock; and give to me an account of all that thou hast done since I left thee in the rose garden or I will split thy ears and stretch thy soul upon a torture rack of hideous noise.”

She lifted her violin again, threateningly.  The novelist came down the path, on a run, to seat himself upon the gray boulder.

The artist shouted with laughter.  But the novelist and the girl paid no heed to his unseemly merriment.