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 soft light gleamed in the corner of the court in a shower of vines. Its light was a little like the soft rays of the Venetian lamp that had shone in the Sherrill garden, but Carl ruthlessly put the memory aside. It had grown once into a devouring flame of evil portent. It must not do so again.
His thoughts were so far away that a soft footfall behind him and the rustle of satin seemed part of that other night until turning restlessly, he caught the sheen of satin, brightly gold in the lantern-glow. The dark, vivid skin, the hair and eyes that were somehow more Spanish than Indian--the golden mask--Carl's face went wildly scarlet.
"Keela!" he cried, springing toward her, "Keela!"
There was much of his old intolerance, much of his impudent immunity to the world's opinion in the curious flash of adjustment which leveled barriers of caste and convention and bridged, for him, in the fashion of a willful uncle, the gulf of race and breeding.