Out from that forest hermitage where the two worked, one in serene though longing happiness, the other under the stern discipline of loss and self-abnegation, had poured, in six short months, a living current of song which had lifted the fame of Royce Melvin to new heights: her fame only, for Banneker would not use his name to the words that rang with a pure and vivid melody of their own. Herein, too, he was paying his debt to Willis Enderby, through the genius of the woman who loved him; preserving that genius with the thin, lustrous, impregnable fiction of his own making against threatening and impotent truth.

Once, when Banneker had brought her a lyric, alive with the sweetness of youth and love in the great open spaces, she had said:

"Ban, shall we call it 'Io?'"

"I don't think it would do," he said with an effort.

"Where is she?"

"Traveling in the tropics."

"You try so hard to keep the sadness out of your voice when you speak of her," said Camilla sorrowfully. "But it's always there. Isn't there anything I can do?"

"Nothing. There's nothing anybody can do."

The blind woman hesitated. "But you care for her still, don't you, Ban?"

"Care! Oh, my God!" whispered Banneker.

"And she cares. I know she cared when she was here. Io isn't the kind of woman to forget easily. She tried once, you know." Miss Van Arsdale smiled wanly. "Why doesn't she ever say anything of you in her letters?"

"She does."

"Very little." (Io's letters, passing through Banneker's hands were carefully censored, of necessity, to forefend any allusion to the tragedy of Willis Enderby, often to the extent of being rewritten complete. It now occurred to Banneker that he had perhaps overdone the matter of keeping his own name out of them.) "Ban," she continued wistfully, "you haven't quarreled, have you?"

"No, Miss Camilla. We haven't quarreled."

"Then _what_ is it, Ban? I don't want to pry; you know me well enough to be sure of that. But if I could only know before the end comes that you two--I wish I could read your face. It's a helpless thing, being blind."

This was as near a complaint as he had ever heard her utter.

"Io's a rich woman, Miss Camilla," he said desperately.

"What of it?"

"How could I ask her to marry a jobless, half-lunged derelict?"

"_Have_ you asked her?"

He was silent.

"Ban, does she know why you're here?"

"Oh, yes; she knows."

"How bitter and desolate your voice sounds when you say that! And you want me to believe that she knows and still doesn't come to you?"

"She doesn't know that I'm--ill," he said, hating himself for the necessity of pretense with Camilla Van Arsdale.

"Then I shall tell her."

"No," he controverted with finality, "I won't allow it."

"Suppose it turned out that this were really the right path for you to travel," she said after a pause; "that you were going to do bigger things here than you ever could do with The Patriot? I believe it's going to be so, Ban; that what you are doing now is going to be your true success."

"Success!" he cried. "Are you going to preach success to me? If ever there was a word coined in hell--I'm sorry, Miss Camilla," he broke off, mastering himself.

She groped her way to the piano, and ran her fingers over the keys.

"There is work, anyway," she said with sure serenity.

"Yes; there's work, thank God!"

Work enough there was for him, not only in his writing, for which he had recovered the capacity after a long period of stunned inaction, but in the constant and unwearied labor of love in building and rebuilding, fortifying and extending, that precarious but still impregnable bulwark of falsehood beneath whose protection Camilla Van Arsdale lived and was happy and made the magic of her song. Illusion! Banneker wondered whether any happiness were other than illusion, whether the illusion of happiness were not better than any reality. But in the world of grim fact which he had accepted for himself was no palliating mirage. Upon him "the illusive eyes of hope" were closed.

While Banneker was practicing his elaborate deceptions, Miss Van Arsdale had perpetrated a lesser one of her own, which she had not deemed it wise to reveal to him in their conversation about Io. Some time before that she had written to her former guest a letter tactfully designed to lay a foundation for resolving the difficulty or misunderstanding between the lovers. In the normal course of events this would have been committed for mailing to Banneker, who would, of course, have confiscated it. But, as it chanced, it was hardly off the typewriter when Dutch Pete dropped in for a friendly call while Banneker was at the village, and took the missive with him for mailing. It traveled widely, amassed postmarks and forwarding addresses, and eventually came to its final port.

Worn out with the hopeless quest of forgetfulness in far lands, Io Eyre came back to New York. It was there that the long pursuit of her by Camilla Van Arsdale's letter ended. Bewilderment darkened Io's mind as she read, to be succeeded by an appalled conjecture; Camilla Van Arsdale's mind had broken down under her griefs. What other hypothesis could account for her writing of Willis Enderby as being still alive?

And of her having letters from him? To the appeal for Banneker which, concealed though it was, underlay the whole purport of the writing, Io closed her heart, seared by the very sight of his name. She would have torn the letter up, but something impelled her to read it again; some hint of a pregnant secret to be gleaned from it, if one but held the clue. Hers was a keen and thoughtful mind. She sent it exploring through the devious tangle of the maze wherein she and Banneker, Camilla Van Arsdale and Willis Enderby had been so tragically involved, and as she patiently studied the letter as possible guide there dawned within her a glint of the truth. It began with the suspicion, soon growing to conviction, that the writer of those inexplicable words was not, could not be insane; the letter breathed a clarity of mind, an untroubled simplicity of heart, a quiet undertone of happiness, impossible to reconcile with the picture of a shattered and grief-stricken victim. Yet Io had, herself, written to Miss Van Arsdale as soon as she knew of Judge Enderby's death, pouring out her heart for the sorrow of the woman who as a stranger had stood her friend, whom, as she learned to know her in the close companionship of her affliction, she had come to love; offering to return at once to Manzanita. To that offer had come no answer; later she had had a letter curiously reticent as to Willis Enderby. (Banneker, in his epistolary personification of Miss Van Arsdale had been perhaps overcautious on this point.) Io began to piece together hints and clues, as in a disjected puzzle:--Banneker's presence in Manzanita--Camilla's blindness.--Her inability to know, except through the medium of others, the course of events.--The bewildering reticence and hiatuses in the infrequent letters from Manzanita, particularly in regard to Willis Enderby.--This calm, sane, cheerful view of him as a living being, a present figure in his old field of action.--The casual mention in an early letter that all of Miss Van Arsdale's reading and most of her writing was done through the nurse or Banneker, mainly the latter, though she was mastering the art of touch-writing on the typewriter. The very style of the earlier letters, as she remembered them, was different. And just here flashed the thought which set her feverishly ransacking the portfolio in which she kept her old correspondence. There she found an envelope with a Manzanita postmark dated four months earlier. The typing of the two letters was not the same.

Groping for some aid in the murk, Io went to the telephone and called up the editorial office of The Sphere, asking for Russell Edmonds. Within two hours the veteran had come to her.

"I have been wanting to see you," he said at once.

"About Mr. Banneker?" she queried eagerly.

"No. About The Searchlight."

"The Searchlight? I don't understand, Mr. Edmonds."

"Can't we be open with each other, Mrs. Eyre?"

"Absolutely, so far as I am concerned."

"Then I want to tell you that you need have no fear as to what The Searchlight may do."

"Still I don't understand. Why should I fear it?"

"The scandal--manufactured, of course--which The Searchlight had cooked up about you and Mr. Banneker before Mr. Eyre's death."

"Surely there was never anything published. I should have heard of it."

"No; there wasn't. Banneker stopped it."

"Ban?"

"Do you mean to say that you knew nothing of this, Mrs. Eyre?" he said, the wonder in his face answering the bewilderment in hers. "Didn't Banneker tell you?"

"Never a word."

"No; I suppose he wouldn't," ruminated the veteran. "That would be like Ban--the old Ban," he added sadly. "Mrs. Eyre, I loved that boy," he broke out, his stern and somber face working. "There are times even now when I can scarcely make myself believe that he did what he did."