He laughed. "I was thinking about down there"--he pointed into the haze of the distant valley to the west. "Don't," she returned, "let's think about up here"--she waved her hand toward the high crest of the San Bernardinos, and the mountain peaks about them. "Will you let me paint your portrait--when we get back to the orange groves?" he asked. "I'm sure I don't know," she returned. "Why do you want to paint me? I'm nobody, you know--but just me." "That's the reason I want to paint you," he answered. "What's the reason?" "Because you are you." "But a portrait of me would not help you on your road to fame," she retorted. He flinched. "Perhaps," he said, "that's partly why I want to do it." "Because it won't help you?" "Because it won't help me on the road to fame. You _will_ pose for me, won't you?" "I'm sure I cannot say"--she answered--"perhaps--please don't let's talk about it." "Why not?" he asked curiously. "Because"--she answered seriously--"we have been such good friends up here in the mountains; such--such comrades. Up here in the hills, with the canyon gates shut against the world that I don't know, you are like--like Brian Oakley--and like my father used to be--and down there"--she hesitated. "Yes," he said, "and down there I will be what?" "I don't know," she answered wistfully, "but sometimes I can see you going on and on and on toward fame and the rewards it will bring you and you seem to get farther and farther and farther away from--from the mountains and our friendship; until you are so far away that I can't see you any more at all. I don't like to lose my mountain friends, you know." He smiled. "But no matter how famous I might become--no matter what fame might bring me--I could not forget you and your mountains." "I would not want you to remember me," she answered "if you were famous. That is--I mean"--she added hesitatingly--"if you were famous just because you _wanted_ to be. But I know you could never forget the mountains. And that would be the trouble; don't you see? If you _could_ forget, it would not matter. Ask Mr. Lagrange, he knows." For some time Aaron King sat, without speaking, looking about at the world that was so far from that other world--the world he had always known. The girl, too,--seeming to understand the thoughts that he himself, perhaps, could not have expressed,--was silent. Then he said slowly, "I don't think that I care for fame as I did before you taught me to know the mountains. It doesn't, somehow, now, seem to matter so much. It's the _work_ that really matters--after all--isn't it?" And Sibyl Andrés, smiling, answered, "Yes, it's the work that really matters. I'm sure that _must_ be so." In the afternoon, they went on, still following the fire-break, down to where it is intersected by the pipe-line a mile from the reservoir on the hill above the power-house; then back to Oak Knoll, again on the pipe-line trail all the way--a beautiful and never-to-be-forgotten walk.