I'd hate awfully to have the Sherrills think I'm in love." Almost anything one could say, reflected Diane uncomfortably, inspired Philip'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.