“Play!” said Keela shyly.

Carl drew the flute from his pocket again and obeyed.

“Like a brook of silver!” said the Indian girl with an abashed revealment of the wild sylvan poetry with which her thoughts were rife.

“The one friend,” said Carl, “to whom I have told all things.  The one friend, Red-winged Blackbird, who always understood!”

“I,” said Keela with majesty, “I too am your friend and I understand.”

Carl reddened a little.

“What do you understand, little Indian lady?” he asked quietly.

He was totally unprepared for the keenness of her unsmiling analysis.

“That you have been very tired in the head,” she nodded, her delicate, vivid face quite grave.  “So tired that you might not see as you should, so tired that the medicine of white men could not reach it, but only the words of Mic-co, who knows all things.  So tired that a moon was not a moon of lovely brightness.  It was a thing of evil fire to scorch.  Uncah?  Mic-co would say warped vision.  I must talk in simpler ways for all I study.”

They fell quiet.

“Read me again that live oak poem of Lanier’s,” said Carl.  “After a while Mic-co will be back to spirit you away to his Room of Books.”

She read, as she frequently read to Carl and Mic-co in the long quiet afternoons, with an accent musical and soft, of the immortal marshes of Glynn.

  “Glooms of the live oaks, beautiful-braided and woven
  With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven
    Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs,—­”

What vivid memories it awoke of the morning the swamp had revealed to him the island home of Mic-co!

  “Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,
  And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
  Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,
  And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,
  And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
  That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn
  Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore
  When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,
  And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnameable pain
  Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain.”

Lanier, dying of heartbreak!  How well he had understood!

  “Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea? 
  Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
  From the weighing of Fate and the sad discussion of sin,
  By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.”

And Keela too had guessed.

  “In the rose-and-silver evening glow,
    Farewell—­”

Keela broke off and laid aside the book.

“I may not read more,” she said, bending to the pottery with wild color in her face.  “I—­I am very tired, Carl.  You go in the morning?”