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?

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--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.

The letters slowly came to her one by one, bringing behind them the
first