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.
So still were they, that a wild bird--darting through the screen of alder boughs--stopped to swing on a limb above their heads, with a burst of wild-wood melody.

In the arroyo beyond the willow wall, a quail called his evening call, and was answered by his mate from the top of the bank under the mistletoe oak.

A pair of gray squirrels crept down the gray trunks of the trees and slipped around the granite boulder to drink at the spring; then scampered away again--half in frolic, half in fright--as they caught sight of the man and the maid.