The gray ocean murmured, the still gray lagoon was asleep!  Here and there a haunting, elusive splash of delicate rose upon the silver promised the later color of a wakening world.  It was a finer, quieter world, thought Diane, than the later day world of white hot sunlight.

With pulses atune to the morning’s freshness, the girl galloped rapidly along the shell-road, the clattering thud of her horse’s hoofs startling in the quiet.  As yet only a sleepy bird or two had begun to twitter.  There was a growing noise of wind in the grass and palms.

A century back it seemed to this girl in whom the restless gypsy tide was subtly fretting, she had left Johnny and the van at Jacksonville to come into this sensuous, tropical world of color, fashionable life and lazy days.

Coloring delicately, the metallic gray bosom of the lake presently foretold the sunrise with a primrose glow.  When at length the glaring white light of the sun struck sparks from the dew upon the pine and palmetto, Diane was riding rapidly south in quest of the Florida flat-woods.  There was a veritable paradise of birds in the pine barren, Dick Sherrill had said, robins and bluebirds, flickers and woodpeckers with blazing cockades, shrikes and chewinks.

It was an endless monotony of pine trees, vividly green and far apart, into which Diane presently rode.  A buzzard floated with uptilted wings above the sparse woodland to the west.  A gorgeous butterfly, silver-spangled, winged its way over the saw palmetto and sedge between the trees to an inviting glade beyond, cleft by a shallow stream.  Swamp, jungle, pine and palmetto were vocal with the melody of many birds.

Diane reined in her horse with a thrill.  This was Florida, at last, not the unreal, exotic brilliance of Palm Beach.  Here was her father’s beloved Flowerland which she had loved as a child.  Here were pines and tall grass, sun-silvered, bending in the warm wind, and the song of a pine-wood sparrow!

From the scrub ahead came his quiet song, infinitely sweet, infinitely plaintive like the faint, soft echo of a fairy’s dream.  A long note and a shower of silver-sweet echoes, so it ran, the invisible singer seeming to sing for himself alone.  So might elfin bells have pealed from a thicket, inexpressibly low and tender.

Diane sat motionless, the free, wild grace of her seeming a part of the primeval quiet.  For somehow, by some twist of singer’s magic, this Florida bird was singing of Connecticut wind and river, of dogwood on a ridge, of water lilies in the purple of a summer twilight, of a spot named forever in her mind—­Arcadia.

Now as the girl listened, a beautiful brown sprite of the rustling pine wood about her, a great flood of color crept suddenly from the brown full throat to the line of her hair, and the scarlet that lingered in her cheeks was wilder than the red of winter holly.

Surely—­surely there was no reason under Heaven why the little bird should sing about a hay-camp!