Where the road curves toward the creek, the
man, without checking his pace, turned his head to look back upon the
valley that, far below, was fast being lost in the gathering dusk. In its
weird and gloomy mystery,--with its hidden life revealed only by the
sparkling, twinkling lights of the towns and cities,--it was suggestive,
now, to his artist mind, of the life that had so nearly caught him in its
glittering sensual snare. A moment later, he lifted his eyes to the
mountain peaks ahead that, still in the light of the western sun, glowed
as though brushed with living fire. Against the sky, he could distinguish
that peak in the Galena range, with the clump of pines, where he had sat
with Sibyl Andres that day when she had tried to make him see the train
that had brought him to Fairlands.
He wondered now, as he rode, why he had not realized his love for the
girl, before they left the hills. It seemed to him, now, that his love was
born that evening when he had first heard her violin, as he was fishing;
when he had watched her from the cedar thicket, as she made her music of
the mountains and as she danced in the grassy yard. Why, he asked himself,
had he not been conscious of his love in those days when she came to him
in the spring glade, and in the days that followed? Why had he not known,
when he painted her portrait in the rose garden? Why had the awakening not
come until that night when he saw her in the company of revelers at the
big house on Fairlands Heights--the night that Mr.
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