There she stood, beside the spring--a teasing smile on her face. Before he could command himself, she danced a step or two, with an elfish air, and slipped away through the green willow wall. Another merry laugh came back to him and then--the silence of the little glade, and the sound of the distant waters.
With the basket of fish in his hand, Aaron King went slowly to camp; where, when Conrad Lagrange saw what the artist carried so carefully, explanations were in order.
Chapter XVIII
Sibyl Andrés and the Butterflies
On the following day, the artist was putting away his things, at the close of the afternoon's work, when the girl appeared.
The long, slanting bars of sunshine and the deepening shadows marked the lateness of the hour. As he bent over his paint-box, the man was thinking with regret that she would not come--that, perhaps, she would never come. And at the thought that he might not see her again, an odd fear gripped his heart. His thoughts were interrupted by a low, musical laugh; and he sprang to his feet, to search the glade with careful eyes.
"Come out," he cried, as though adjuring an invisible spirit. "I know you are here; come out."
With another laugh, she stepped from behind the trunk of one of the largest trees, within a few feet of where he stood. As she went toward him, she carried in her outstretched hands a graceful basket, woven of sycamore leaves and ferns, and filled with the ripest sweetest blackberries. She did not speak as she held out her offering; but the man, looking into her laughing eyes, fancied that there was a meaning and a purpose in the gift that did not appear upon the surface of her simple action.
Expressing his pleasure, as he received the dainty basket, he could not refrain from adding, "But why do you bring me things?"
She answered with that wayward, mocking humor that so often seized her; "Because I like to. I told you that I always do what I like--up here in the mountains."