"Fortunate you!" Edmonds wreathed his little congratulation in festoons of light vapor. "But you live in a world of your own making. Marrineal is reckoning on the world which lives and thinks largely in terms of what its neighbor thinks of it."

"He once said to me," remarked Banneker, "that the desire to get into or keep out of print could be made the master-key to new and undreamed-of powers of journalism if one had the ability to find a formula for it."

"I'm not sure that I understand what he means," said Miss Van Arsdale, "but it has a sinister sound."

"Are Baal's other names Bribery and Blackmail?" glowered Edmonds.

"There has never been a hint of any illegitimate use of the paper, so far as I can discover. Yet it's pretty plain to me that he intends to use it as an instrument."

"As soon as we've made it strong enough," supplied Edmonds.

"An instrument of what?" inquired Miss Van Arsdale.

"Power for himself. Political, I suppose."

"Does he want office?" she asked.

"Perhaps. Perhaps he prefers the deeper-lying power to make and unmake politicians. We've done it already in a few cases. That's Edmonds's specialty. I'll know within a few days what Marrineal wants, if I can get a showdown. He and I are coming to a new basis of finance."

"Yes; he thinks he can't afford to keep on paying you by circulation.

You're putting on too much." This from Edmonds.

"That's what he got me here for. However, I don't really believe he can.

I'm eating up what should be the paper's legitimate profits. And yet"--he smiled radiantly--"there are times when I don't see how I'm going to get along with what I have. It's pretty absurd, isn't it, to feel pinched on fifty thousand a year, when I did so well at Manzanita on sixty a month?"

"It's a fairy-tale," declared Miss Van Arsdale. "I knew that you were going to arrive sooner or later, Ban. But this isn't an arrival. It's a triumph."

"Say rather it's a feat of balancing," he propounded. "A tight-rope stunt on a gilded rope. Failure on one side; debt on the other. Keep going like the devil to save yourself from falling."

"What is it making of him, Mr. Edmonds?" Banneker's oldest friend turned her limpid and anxious regard upon his closest friend.

"A power. Oh, it's real enough, all this empire of words that crumbles daily. It leaves something behind, a little residue of thought, ideals, convictions. What do you fear for him?"

"Cynicism," she breathed uneasily.

"It's the curse of the game. But it doesn't get the worker who feels his work striking home."

"Do you see any trace of cynicism in the paper?" asked Banneker curiously.

"All this blaring and glaring and froth and distortion," she replied, sweeping her hand across the issue which lay on the desk before her.

"Can you do that sort of thing and not become that sort of thing?"

"Ask Edmonds," said Banneker.

"Thirty years I've been in this business," said the veteran slowly. "I suppose there are few of its problems and perplexities that I haven't been up against. And I tell you, Miss Van Arsdale, all this froth and noise and sensationalism doesn't matter. It's an offense to taste, I know. But back of it is the big thing that we're trying to do; to enlist the ignorant and helpless and teach them to be less ignorant and helpless. If fostering the political ambitions of a Marrineal is part of the price, why, I'm willing to pay it, so long as the paper keeps straight and doesn't sell itself for bribe money. After all, Marrineal can ride to his goal only on our chariot. The Patriot is an institution now. You can't alter an institution, not essentially. You get committed to it, to the thing you've made yourself. Ban and I have made the new Patriot, not Marrineal. Even if he got rid of us, he couldn't change the paper; not for a long time and only very gradually. The following that we've built up would be too strong for him."

"Isn't it too strong for you two?" asked the doubting woman-soul.

"No. We understand it because we made it."

"Frankenstein once said something like that," she murmured.

"It isn't a monster," rumbled Edmonds. "Sometimes I think it's a toy dog, with Ban's ribbon around its cute little neck. I'll answer for Ban, Miss Van Arsdale."

The smoke of his minute pipe went up, tenuous and graceful, incense devoted to the unseen God behind the strangely patterned curtain of print; to Baal who was perhaps even then grinning down upon his unsuspecting worshipers.

But Banneker, moving purposefully amidst that vast phantasmagoria of pulsing print, wherein all was magnified, distorted, perverted to the claims of a gross and rabid public appetite, dreamed his pure, untainted dream; the conception of his newspaper as a voice potent enough to reach and move all; dominant enough to impose its underlying ideal; confident enough of righteousness to be free of all silencing and control. That voice should supply the long unsatisfied hunger of the many for truth uncorrupted. It should enunciate straightly, simply, without reservation, the daily verities destined to build up the eternal structure. It should be a religion of seven days a week, set forth by a thousand devoted preachers for a million faithful hearers.

Camilla Van Arsdale had partly read his dream, and could have wept for it and him.

Io Eyre had begun to read it, and her heart went out to him anew. For this was the test of success.

CHAPTER III

It was one of those mornings of coolness after cloying heat when even the crowded, reeking, frowzy metropolis wakes with a breath of freshness in its nostrils. Independent of sleep as ever, Banneker was up and footing it briskly for the station before eight o'clock, for Camilla Van Arsdale was returning to Manzanita, having been ordered back to her seclusion with medical science's well-considered verdict wrapped up in tactful words to bear her company on the long journey. When she would be ordered on a longer journey by a mightier Authority, medical science forbore to specify; but in the higher interests of American music it was urgently pressed upon her that she be abstemious in diet, niggardly of work, careful about fatigue and excitement, and in general comport herself in such manner as to deprive the lease of life remaining to her of most of its savor and worth. She had told Ban that the physicians thought her condition favorable.

Invalidism was certainly not suggested in her erect bearing and serene face as she moved about her stateroom setting in order the books, magazines, flowers, and candy, with which Banneker had sought to fortify her against the tedium of the trip. As the time for departure drew near, they fell into and effortfully maintained that meaningless, banal, and jerky talk which is the inevitable concomitant of long partings between people who, really caring for each other, can find nothing but commonplaces wherewith to ease their stress of mind. Miss Van Arsdale's common sense came to the rescue.

"Go away, my dear," she said, with her understanding smile. "Don't think that you're obliged to cling to the dragging minutes. It's an ungraceful posture.... Ban! What makes you look like that?"

"I thought--I heard--"

A clear voice outside said, "Then it must be this one." There was a decisive tap on the door. "May I come in?"..."Come in," responded Miss Van Arsdale. "Bring them here, porter," directed the voice outside, and Io entered followed by an attendant almost hidden in a huge armful of such roses as are unpurchasable even in the most luxurious of stores.

"I've looted our conservatory," said she. "Papa will slay me. They'll last to Chicago."

After an almost imperceptible hesitation she kissed the older woman. She gave her hand to Banneker. "I knew I should find you here."

"Any other woman of my acquaintance would have said, 'Who would have expected to find you here!'" commented Miss Van Arsdale.

"Yes? I suppose so. But we've never been on that footing, Ban and I."

Io's tone was casual; almost careless.

"I thought that you were in the country," said Banneker.

"So we are. I drove up this morning to bid Miss Van Arsdale _bon voyage_, and all the luck in the world. I suppose we three shall meet again one of these days."

"You prophesy in the most matter-of-fact tone a gross improbability,"

observed Miss Van Arsdale.

"Oh, our first meeting was the gross improbability," retorted the girl lightly. "After that anything might be logical. _Au revoir_."

"Go with her, Ban," said Miss Camilla.

"It isn't leaving time yet," he protested. "There's five whole minutes."