When she returned again up the canyon, all the brightness of her day was
gone. Her heart was heavy with foreboding fear. She was oppressed with a
dread of some impending evil which she could not understand. At every
sound in the mountain wild-wood, she started. Time and again, as if
expecting pursuit, she looked over her shoulder--poised like a creature of
the woods ready for instant panic-stricken flight. So, without pausing to
cast for trout, or even to go down to the stream, she returned home; where
Myra Willard, seeing her come so early and empty handed, wondered. But to
the woman's question, the girl only answered that she had changed her
mind--that, after recovering her gloves and fly-book at the camp of their
friends, she had decided to come home. The woman with the disfigured face,
knowing that Aaron King was leaving the hills the next day, thought that
she understood the girl's mood, and wisely made no comment.
The artist and Conrad Lagrange went to spend their last evening in the
hills with their friends. Brian Oakley, too, dropped in. But neither of
the three men mentioned the name of James Rutlidge in the presence of the
women; while Sibyl was, apparently, again her own bright and happy
self--carrying on a fanciful play of words with the novelist, singing with
the artist, and making music for them all with her violin.
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