"Yes," returned the girl, "but you have never taught me to see with the eyes of the world. So, to me, what the world sees, does not matter."
"Pray that it may never matter, child," answered the woman with the disfigured face, earnestly.
Then, as they went out to the porch, she asked, "Did you meet Mr. Oakley as you were coming home?"
Sibyl laughed and colored with a confusion that was new to her, as she answered, "Yes, I did--and he scolded me."
"No,--but he told me about that too. I don't see why, whenever a poor criminal escapes, he always comes into _our_ mountains. I don't like to 'pack a gun'--unless I'm hunting. But Brian Oakley didn't scold me for that, though--he knows I always do as he says. He scolded because I hadn't told you about my going to see Mr. King, in the spring glade." She laughed, conscious of the color that was in her cheeks. "I told him it didn't matter whether I told you or not, because he always knows every single move I make, anyway."
"Why _didn't_ you tell me, dear?" asked the woman. "You never kept anything from me, before--I'm sure."
"Why dearest," the girl answered frankly, "I don't know, myself, why I didn't tell you"--which, Myra Willard knew, was the exact truth.
Then Sibyl told her foster-mother everything about her acquaintance with the artist and Conrad Lagrange--from the time she first watched the painter, from the arbor in the rose garden, where she met the novelist; until that afternoon, when she had invited them to supper, the next day. Only of her dancing before the artist, the girl did not tell.
Later in the evening, Sibyl--saying that she would sing Myra to sleep--took her violin to the porch, outside the window; and in the dusk made soft music until the woman's troubled heart was calmed. When the moon came up from behind the Galenas, across the canyon, the girl tiptoed into the house, to bend over the sleeping woman, in tender solicitude. With that mother tenderness belonging to all true women, she stooped and softly kissed the disfigured face upon the pillow. At the touch, Myra Willard stirred uneasily; and the girl--careful to make no sound--withdrew.
On the porch, she again took up her violin as if to play; but, instead, sat motionless--her face turned down the canyon--her eyes looking far away. Then, quickly, she put aside the instrument, and--as though with sudden yielding to some inner impulse--slipped out into the grassy yard. And there, in the moon's white light,--with only the mountains, the trees, and the flowers to see,--she danced, again, as she had danced before the artist in the glade--with her face turned down the canyon, and her arms outstretched, longingly, toward the camp in the sycamores back of the old orchard.