"I hope you always will," he returned, "if your likes are all as delicious as this one."
With the manner of a child playfully making a mystery yet anxious to have the secret discussed, she said, "I have one more gift to bring you, yet."
"I knew you meant something by your presents," he cried. "It isn't just because you want me to have the things you bring."
"Oh, yes it is," she retorted, laughing mischievously at his triumphant and expectant tone. "If I didn't want you to have the things I bring--why--I wouldn't bring them, would I?"
"But that isn't all," he insisted. "Tell me--why do you say you have one more gift to bring?"
She shook her head with a delightful air of mystery "Not until I come again. When I come again, I will tell you."
"And you will come to-morrow?"
She laughed teasingly at his eagerness. "How can I tell?" she answered. "I do not know, myself, what I will do to-morrow--when I am up here in the mountains--when the canyon gates are shut and the world is left outside." Even as she spoke, her mood changed and the last words were uttered wistfully, as a captive spirit--that, by nature wild and free, was permitted, for a brief time only, to go beyond its prison walls--might have spoken.
The artist--puzzled by her flash-like change of moods, and by her manner as she spoke of the world beyond the canyon gates--had no words to reply. As he stood there,--in that little glade where the light fell as in a quiet cathedral and the air trembled with the deep organ-tones of the distant waters--holding in his hands the basket of leaves and ferns with its wild fruit, and looking at the beautiful girl who had brought her offering with the naturalness of a child of the mountains and the air of a woodland spirit,--he again felt that the world he had always known was very far away.
The girl, too, was silent--as though, by some subtle power, she knew his thoughts and did not wish to interrupt.