hould, 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?"

"Yes."

"You are strong--and sure?"

"Yes. Quite. I've promised Mic-co not to lose my grip again."

"And sometime you will come here again?"

"Often!"

A little later she went quietly away to the Room of Books with Mic-co.

When the evening star flashed silver in the lilied pool, Carl sat
alone. Mic-co had been summoned away by an Indian servant. A