"Anyway," he said with a sudden savage jealousy, "whatever happened you would not have gone away to marry Eyre."

"Should I not? I'm by no means sure. You don't understand much of me, my poor Ban."

"How could you!" he burst out. "Would that have been--"

"Oh, I should have told him, of course. I'd have said, 'Del, there's been another man, a lover.' One could say those things to him."

"Would he have married you?"

"You wouldn't, would you?" she smiled. "All or nothing, Ban, for you.

About Del, I don't know." She shrugged dainty shoulders. "I shouldn't have much cared."

"And would you have come back to me, Io?"

"Do you want me to say 'Yes'? You do want me to say' Yes,' don't you, my dear? How can I tell?... Sooner or later, I suppose. Fate. The irresistible current. I am here now."

"Io." He leaned to her across the little table, his somber regard holding hers. "Why did you tell Camilla Van Arsdale that you would never divorce Eyre?"

"Because it's true."

"But why tell her? So that it should come back to me?"

She answered him straight and fearlessly. "Yes. I thought it would be easier for you to hear from her."

"Did you?" He sat staring past her at visions. It was not within Banneker's code, his sense of fair play in the game, to betray to Io his wonderment (shared by most of her own set) that she should have endured the affront of Del Eyre's openly flagitious life, even though she had herself implied some knowledge of it in her assumption that a divorce could be procured. However, Io met his reticence with characteristic candor.

"Of course I know about Del. We have a perfect understanding. He's agreed to maintain the outward decencies, from now on. I don't consider that I've the right to ask more. You see, I shouldn't have married him ... even though he understood that I wasn't really in love with him.

We're friends; and we're going to remain friends. Just that. Del's a good sort," she added with a hint of pleading the cause of a misunderstood person. "He'd give me my divorce in a minute; even though he still cares--in his way. But there's his mother. She's a sort of latter-day saint; one of those rare people that you respect and love in equal parts; the only other one I know is Cousin Willis Enderby. She's an invalid, hopeless, and a Roman Catholic, and for me to divorce Del would poison the rest of her life. So I won't. I can't."

"She won't live forever," muttered Banneker.

"No. Not long, perhaps." There was pain and resolution in Io's eyes as they were lifted to meet his again. "There's another reason. I can't tell even you, Ban. The secret isn't mine.... I'm sorry."

"Haven't you any work to do to-day?" she asked after a pause, with a successful effect of lightness.

He roused himself, settled the check, and took her to her car, parked near by.

"Where do you go now?" he asked.

"Back to the country."

"When shall I see you again?"

"I wonder," said Io.

CHAPTER IV

Panem et Circenses; bread and the Big Show. The diagnosis of the satyr-like mathematician had been accurate. That same method whereby the tyrants of Rome had sought to beguile the restless and unthinking multitude, Banneker adopted to capture and lead the sensation-avid metropolitan public through his newspaper. As a facture, a creation made to the mind of the creator, The Patriot was Banneker's own. True, Marrineal reserved full control. But Marrineal, after a few months spent in anxious observation of his editor's headlong and revolutionary method, had taken the sales reports for his determinative guide and decided to give the new man full sway.

Circulation had gone up as water rises in a tube under irresistible pressure from beneath. Nothing like it had ever been known in local journalism. Barring some set-back, within four years of the time when Banneker's introductory editorial appeared, the paper would have eclipsed all former records. In less than two years it had climbed to third place, and already Banneker's salary, under the percentage agreement, was, in the words of the alliterative Gardner, whose article describing The House With Three Eyes and its owner had gone forth on the wings of a far-spreading syndicate, "a stupendous stipend."

Banneker's editorials pervaded and gave the keynote. With sublime self-confidence he had adopted the untried scheme of having no set and determined place for the editorial department. Sometimes, his page appeared in the middle of the paper; sometimes on the back; and once, when a most promising scheme of municipal looting was just about to be put through, he fired his blast from the front sheet in extra heavy, double-leaded type, displacing an international yacht race and a most titillating society scandal with no more explanation than was to be found in the opening sentence:

"This is more important to YOU, Mr. New Yorker, than any other news in to-day's issue."

"Where Banneker sits," Russell Edmonds was wont to remark between puffs, "is the head of the paper."

"Let 'em look for the stuff," said Banneker confidently. "They'll think all the more of it when they find it."

Often he used inset illustrations, not so much to give point to his preachments, as to render them easier of comprehension to the unthinking. And always he sought the utmost of sensationalism in caption and in type, employing italics, capitals, and even heavy-face letters with an effect of detonation.

"Jollies you along until he can see the white of your mind, and then fires his slug into your head, point-blank," Edmonds said.

With all this he had the high art to keep his style direct, unaffected, almost severe. No frills, no literary graces, no flashes of wit except an occasional restrained touch of sarcasm: the writing was in the purest style and of a classic simplicity. The typical reader of The Patriot had a friendly and rather patronizing feeling for the editorials: they were generally deemed quite ordinary, "common as an old shoe" (with an approving accent from the commentator), comfortably devoid of the intricate elegancies practiced by Banneker's editorial compeers. So they were read and absorbed, which was all that their writer hoped or wished for them. He was not seeking the bubble, reputation, but the solid satisfaction of implanting ideas in minds hitherto unaroused to mental processes, and training the resultant thought in his chosen way and to eventual though still vague purposes.

"They're beginning to imitate you, Ban," commented Russell Edmonds in the days of The Patriot's first surprising upward leap. "Flattery of your peers."

"Let 'em imitate," returned Banneker indifferently.

"Yes; they don't come very near to the original. It's a fundamental difference in style."

"It's a fundamental difference in aim."

"Aim?"

"They're writing at and for their owners; to make good with the boss.

I'm writing at my public."

"I believe you're right. It's more difficult, though, isn't it, to write for a hundred thousand people than at one?"

"Not if you understand them from study at first hand, as I do. That's why the other fellows are five or ten-thousand-dollar men," said Banneker, quite without boastfulness "while I'm--"

"A fifty-thousand-dollar a year man," supplied Edmonds.

"Well, getting toward that figure. I'm on the target with the editorials and I'm going to hold on it. But our news policy is different. We still wobble there."

"What do you want! Look at the circulation. Isn't that good enough?"

"No. Every time I get into a street-car and see a passenger reading some other paper, I feel that we've missed fire," returned Banneker inexorably. "Pop, did you ever see an actress make up?"

"I've a general notion of the process."

"Find me a man who can make up news ready and rouged to go before the daily footlights as an actress makes up her face."