In a moment more she paused, as the full-length picture of a man gazed at her from the paper.
"No, not him. He is too old. My father was not old. And he was handsome, and he was not dark at all."
She shut the book for a moment, and her face was full of puzzle and of pain.
"I said it. I was not talking Apache then. And I understood what I was saying."
She had indeed, when she mentioned her father, spoken pretty clearly in English.
Was it her mother-tongue, and had it come back to her?
She turned over the leaves more eagerly than ever now, and she found in that and the two other magazines many pictured faces of men of all ages, but each one brought her a fresh disappointment.
"He is not here," she said, mournfully, "and it was he who taught me to—to—to read—books."
She had found two words now that were like little windows, for through them she could see a world of wonderful things that she had not seen before—"read" and "books."
The three magazines were no longer "talking leaves" to her, although they were really beginning to talk. Her head ached, and her eyes were burning hot, as she gazed so intently at word after word of the page which happened to be open before her. It was not printed like the rest. Less closely, and not in such a thronging mass of little black spots of letters. It was a piece of very simple poetry, in short lines and brief stanzas, and Rita was staring at its title.