* * * * *

Not many days later, there was a quiet wedding, at Sibyl’s old home in the hills.  Besides the two young people and the clergyman, only Brian Oakley, Mrs. Oakley, Conrad Lagrange and Myra Willard were present.  These friends who had prepared the old place for the mating ones, after a simple dinner following the ceremony, returned down the canyon to the Station.

Standing arm in arm, where the old road turns around the cedar thicket, and where the artist had first seen the girl, Sibyl and Aaron watched them go.  From the other side of roaring Clear Creek, they turned to wave hats and handkerchiefs; the two in the shadow of the cedars answered; Czar barked joyful congratulations; and the wagon disappeared in the wilderness growth.

Instead of turning back to the house behind them, the two, without speaking, as though obeying a common impulse, set out down the canyon.

A little later they stood in the old spring glade, where the alders bore, still, in the smooth, gray bark of their trunks, the memories of long-ago lovers; where the light fell, slanting softly through the screen of leaf and branch and vine and virgin’s-bower, upon the granite boulder and the cress-mottled waters of the spring, as through the window traceries of a vast and quiet cathedral; and where the distant roar of the mountain stream trembled in the air like the deep tones of some great organ.

Sibyl, dressed in her brown, mountain costume, was sitting on the boulder, when the artist said softly, “Look!”

Lifting her eyes, as he pointed, she saw two butterflies—­it might almost have been the same two—­with zigzag flight, through the opening in the draperies of virgin’s-bower.  With parted lips and flushed cheeks, the girl watched.  Then—­as the beautiful creatures, in their aerial waltz, whirled above her head—­she rose, and lightly, gracefully,—­almost as her winged companions,—­accompanied them in their dance.

The winged emblems of innocence and purity flitted away over the willow wall.  The girl, with bright eyes and smiling lips—­half laughing, half serious—­looked toward her mate.  He held out his arms and she went to him.

The End