Rita's face had been growing very white, and now she covered it with both her hands and began to cry. The picture was one of a fine-looking lady and a little girl of, it might be, seven or eight years. Not Rita and her mother, surely, for the lady wore a coronet upon her head and carried a sceptre in her hand; but the little girl looked very much as Rita must have looked at her age. It was a picture of some Spanish princess and her daughter, but like many pictures of such people that are printed, it would have served as well for a portrait of almost anybody else—particularly, as it seemed, of Rita and her mother.
"He is not there. Why did they not put him in? I love him best. Oh, he was so good to me! He had plenty of talking leaves, too, and he taught them to speak to me. I will look and see if he is here."
Rita was talking aloud to herself, but her own voice sounded strange to her, with its Indian words and ways of expression. She was listening, without knowing it, for another voice—for several of them—and none of them spoke Apache.
She turned leaf after leaf with fluttering haste, in her eager search for that other face she had spoken of.
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?