's brain to fresh fertility.

The camp of Keela, domiciled indefinitely in the flat-woods to sell to
winter tourists, proved a welcome outlet for the fretting gypsy tide in
Diane's veins. She found the Indian girl's magnetism irresistible.

Proud, unerringly truthful, fastidious in speech and personal habit,
truly majestic and generous, such was the shy woodland companion with
whom Diane chose willfully to spend her idle hours, finding the girl's
unconstrained intervals of silence, her flashes of Indian keenness, her
inborn reticence and naive parade of the wealth of knowledge Mic-co had
taught her, a most bewildering book in which there was daily something
new to read.

There was a keen, quick brain behind the dark and lovely eyes, a
faultless knowledge of the courtesies of finer folk. Mic-co had
wrought generously and well. Only the girl's inordinate shyness and
the stern traditions of her tribe, Diane fancied, kept her chained to
her life in the Glades.

Keela, strangely apart from Indian and white man, and granted
unconventional license by her tribe, hungered most for the ways of the
white father of whom she frequently spoke.

Diane learned smoke signals and the blazing and blinding of a trail, an
inexhaustible and tragic fund of tribal history which had been handed
down from mouth to mouth for generations, legends and songs, wailing
dirges and native dances and snatches of the chaste and oathless speech
of the Florida Indian.

"Diane, _dear_!" exclaimed Ann Sherrill one lazy morning, "what in the
_world_ is that exceedingly mournful tune you're humming?"

"That," said Diane, "is the 'Song of the Great Horned Owl,' my clever
little Indian friend taught me. Isn't it plaintive?"

"It is!" said Ann with deep conviction. "_Entirely_ too much so. I
feel creepy. And Nathalie says you did some picturesque dance for her
and your aunt--"

"The 'Dance of the Wild Turkey,'" explained Diane, much amused at the
recollection. "Aunt Agatha insisted that it was some iniquitous and
cunningly disguised Seminole species of turkey trot. She was horribly
shocked and grew white as a ghost at my daring--"

"Fiddlesticks!" said Ann Sherrill. "She ought to have _all_ the shock
out of her by now after bringing up you and Carl! _I'm_ going to ride
out to the flat-woods with you, for I'm simply _dying_ for a new
sensation. Dick's as stupid as an owl. He does nothing but hang
around the Beach Club. And Philip Poynter's