"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.
The golden mask dropped.
"Is it not a pretty farewell?" she faltered, with a wistful glance at the shimmering gown. "Diane gave it all. As you saw me first, so—now!"
Some lines of Lanier's poem of the morning were ringing wildly in Carl's ears.
"The blades of the marsh grass stir;
Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whir;
Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;
And the sea and the marsh are one."
"Why do you look at me so?" asked Keela.
"I have been a fool," said Carl steadily, "a very great fool—and blind."
Keela's lovely, sensitive mouth quivered.
"Is it—" she raised glistening, glorified eyes to his troubled face, "is it," she whispered naïvely, "that you care like the lovers in Mic-co's books?"