“With an automobile you could overtake her,” said Myra Willard.

“I know,” returned the artist, “but if I take a horse, we can ride back together.”

He started through the grove, toward the other house, on a run.

Chapter XXXII

The Mysterious Disappearance

By the time Aaron King had found a saddle-horse and was ready to start on his ride, it was six o’clock.

Granting that Conrad Lagrange was right in his supposition that the girl had left with the intention of going to Brian Oakley’s, the artist could scarcely, now, hope to arrive at the Ranger Station until some time after Sibyl had reached the home of her friends—­unless she should stop somewhere on the way, which he did not think likely.  Once, as he realized how the minutes were slipping away, he was on the point of reconsidering his reply to Myra Willard’s suggestion that he take an automobile.  Then, telling himself that he would surely find Sibyl at the Station and thinking of the return trip with her, he determined to carry out his first plan.

But when he was finally on the road, he did not ride with less haste because he no longer expected to overtake Sibyl.  In spite of his reassuring himself, again and again, that the girl he loved was safe, his mind was too disturbed by the situation to permit of his riding leisurely.  Beyond the outskirts of the city, with his horse warmed to its work, the artist pushed his mount harder and harder until the animal reached the limit of a pace that its rider felt it could endure for the distance they had to go.  Over the way that he and Conrad Lagrange had walked with Czar and Croesus so leisurely, he went, now, with such hot haste that the people in the homes in the orange groves, sitting down to their evening meal, paused to listen to the sharp, ringing beat of the galloping hoofs.  Two or three travelers, as he passed, watched him out of sight, with wondering gaze.  Those he met, turned their heads to look after him.

Aaron King’s thoughts, as he rode, kept pace with his horse’s flying feet.  The points along the way, where he and the famous novelist had stopped to rest, and to enjoy the beauty of the scene, recalled vividly to his mind all that those weeks in the mountains had brought to him.  Backward from that day when he had for the first time set his face toward the hills, his mind traveled—­almost from day to day—­until he stood, again, in that impoverished home of his boyhood to which he had been summoned from his studies abroad.  As he urged his laboring horse forward, in the eagerness and anxiety of his love for Sibyl Andres, he lived again that hour when his dying mother told her faltering story of his father’s dishonor; when he knew, for the first time, her life of devotion to him, and learned of her sacrifice—­even unto poverty—­that he might, unhampered, be fitted for his life work; and when, receiving his inheritance, he had made his