“Then it was before she got those scars,” returned the Ranger.  “No one could ever forget her face as it is now.”

“At the same time,” commented the artist, “the scars would prevent your identifying her if she received them after you had known her.”

“All the same,” said Conrad Lagrange,—­as though his mind was bothered by his inability to establish some incident in his memory,—­“I’ll place her yet.  Do you mind, Brian, telling us what you do know of her?”

“Why, not at all,” returned the officer.  “The story is anybody’s property.  Its being so well known is probably the reason you didn’t hear it when you were up here before.

“Sibyl’s father and mother were here in the mountains when I came.  They lived up there at the old place where Myra and Sibyl are camping now, and I never expect to meet finer people—­either in this world or the next.  For twenty years I knew them intimately.  Will Andres was as true and square and white a man as ever lived and Nelly was just as good a woman as he was a man.  They and my wife and I were more like brothers and sisters than most folks who are actually blood kin.

“One day, along toward sundown, about a month before Sibyl was born, Nelly heard the dogs barking and went to see what was up.  There stood Myra Willard at the gate—­like she’d dropped out of the sky.  Where she came from God only knows—­except that she’d walked from some station on the railroad over toward the pass.  She was just about all in; and, of course, Nelly had her into the house and was fixing her up in no time.  She wanted to work, but admitted that she had never done much housework.  She said, straight out, that they should never know more about her than they knew, then; but insisted that she was not a bad woman.  At first, Will and I were against it for, of course, it was easy to see that she was trying to get away from something.  But the women—­Nelly and my wife—­somehow, believed in her, and—­with the baby due to arrive in a month and any kind of help hard to get—­they carried the day.  Well, sir, she made good.  If twenty years acquaintance goes for anything, she’s one of God’s own kind, and I don’t care a damn what her history is.

“We soon saw that she was educated and refined, and—­as you can see for yourself—­she must have been remarkably beautiful before she got so disfigured.  When the baby was born, she just took the little one into her poor, broken heart like it had been her own, until Sibyl hardly knew which was her own mother.  When the girl was old enough for school, Myra begged Will and Nelly to let her teach the child.  She was always sending for books and it was about that time that she sent for a violin.  The girl took to music like a bird.  And—­well—­that’s the way Sibyl was raised.  She’s got all the education that the best of them have—­even to French and Italian and German—­and she’s missed some things that the schools teach outside of their text-books.  She has a library—­given to her mostly by Myra, a book at a time—­that represents the best of the world’s best writers.  You know what her music is.  But, hell!”—­the Ranger interrupted himself with an apologetic laugh—­“I’m supposed to be talking about Myra Willard.  I don’t know as I’m so far off, either, because what Sibyl is—­aside from her natural inheritance from Will and Nelly—­Myra has made her.