light.

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 su