'clock.

Granting that Conrad Lagrange was right in his supposition that the girl
had left with the intention of going to Brian Oakley's, the artist could
scarcely, now, hope to arrive at the Ranger Station until some time after
Sibyl had reached the home of her friends--unless she should stop
somewhere on the way, which he did not think likely. Once, as he realized
how the minutes were slipping away, he was on the point of reconsidering
his reply to Myra Willard's suggestion that he take an automobile. Then,
telling himself that he would surely find Sibyl at the Station and
thinking of the return trip with her, he determined to carry out his first
plan.

But when he was finally on the road, he did not ride with less haste
because he no longer expected to overtake Sibyl. In spite of his
reassuring himself, again and again, that the girl he loved was safe, his
mind was too disturbed by the situation to permit of his riding leisurely.
Beyond the outskirts of the city, with his horse warmed to its work, the
artist pushed his mount harder and harder until the animal reached the
limit of a pace that its rider felt it could endure for the distance they
had to go. Over the way that he and Conrad Lagrange had walked with Czar
and Croesus so leisurely, he went, now, with such hot haste that the
people in the homes in the orange groves, sitting down to their evening
meal, paused to listen to the sharp, ringing beat of the galloping hoofs.
Two or three travelers, as he passed, watched him out of sight, with
wondering gaze. Those he met, turned their heads to look after him.

Aaron King's thoughts, as he rode, kept pace with his horse's flying feet.
The points along the way, where he and the famous novelist had stopped to
rest, and to enjoy the beauty of the scene, recalled vividly to his mind
all that those weeks in the mountains had brought to him. Backward from
that day when he had for the first time set his face toward the hills, his
mind traveled--almost from day to day--until he stood, again, in that
impoverished home of his boyhood to which he had been summoned from his
studies abroad. As he urged his laboring horse forward, in the eagerness
and anxiety of his love for Sibyl Andres, he lived again that hour when
his dying mother told her faltering story of his father's dishonor; when
he knew, for the first time, her life of devotion to him, and learned of
her sacrifice--even unto poverty--that he might, unhampered, be fitte