Under the watchful, experienced care of the woman with the disfigured
face, only the worthy had been permitted to enter into the life of this
child of the hills. Sibyl's character--mind and heart and body and
soul--had been formed by the strength and purity of her mountain
environment; by her association with her parents, with Myra Willard, and
with her parents' life-long friends; and by her mental comradeship with
the greatest spirits that music and literature have given to the world. As
her physical strength and beauty was the gift of her free mountain life,
the beauty and strength of her pure spirit was the gift of those kindred
spirits that are as mountains in the mental and spiritual life of the
race.
Love had come to Sibyl Andres, not as it comes to those girls who, in the
hot-house of passion we call civilization, are forced into premature and
sickly bloom by an atmosphere of sensuality. Love had come to her so
gently, so naturally, so like the opening of a wild flower, that she had
not yet understood that it was love. Even as her womanhood had come to
fulfill her girlhood, so Aaron King had come into her life to fulfill her
womanhood. She had chosen her mate with an unconscious obedience to the
laws of life that was divinely reckless of the world.
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