When no living object met her eye, and she could hear no sound save the lonely wind in the pines and the faint murmur of the stream in the gorge below, she took the few steps that yet remained of the climb, and seated herself for a moment's well-earned rest.

Some small animal, she told herself,--a squirrel or a wood-rat, perhaps,--frightened at her approach, and scurrying hastily to cover, had dislodged the pebbles with the slight noise that she had heard.
From where she sat with her back against the trunk of a great pine, she could see--far below, and beyond the immediate spurs and shoulders of the range, on the farther side of the gorge out of which she had just come--the lower end of Clear Creek canyon, and, miles away, under the blue haze of the distance, the dark squares of the orange groves of Fairlands.
Somewhere between those canyon gates and the little city in the orange groves, the girl knew that Aaron King and his friend were making their way back to the world of men.

With her eyes fixed upon the distant scene, as if striving for a wholly impossible strength of vision to mark the tiny, moving spots that she knew were there, the girl upon the high rim of the wild and lonely mountain gorge was lost to her surroundings, in an effort, as vain, to see her comrade of the weeks just past, in the years that were to come.

Would the friendship born in the hills endure in the world beyond the canyon gates?
Could it endure away from those scenes that had given it birth?
Was it possible for a fellowship, established in the free atmosphere of the mountains, to live in the lower altitude of Fairlands?
Sibyl Andres,--as she sat there, alone in the hills she loved,--in her heart of hearts, answered her own questions, "No." But still she searched the years to come--even as her eyes so futilely searched the distant landscape beyond the mighty gates that seemed, now, to shut her in from that world to which Aaron King was returning.
The girl was aroused from her abstraction by a sound behind her and a little to the left of the tree against which she was leaning.

In a flash, she was on her feet.
James Rutlidge stood a few steps away.