“Far from it on this line,” he answered, adopting her light tone.  “Particularly if we have more rain.  You may become a permanent resident yet.”

Some rods short of the Van Arsdale cabin the trail took a sharp turn amidst the brush.  Halfway on the curve Io caught at Banneker’s near rein.

“Hark!” she exclaimed.

The notes of a piano sounded faintly clear in the stillness.  As the harmonies dissolved and merged, a voice rose above them, resonant and glorious, rose and sank and pleaded and laughed and loved, while the two young listeners leaned unconsciously toward each other in their saddles.  Silence fell again.  The very forest life itself seemed hushed in a listening trance.

“Heavens!” whispered Banneker.  “Who is it?”

“Camilla Van Arsdale, of course.  Didn’t you know?”

“I knew she was musical.  I didn’t know she had a voice like that.”

“Ten years ago New York was wild over it.”

“But why—­”

“Hush!  She’s beginning again.”

Once more the sweep of the chords was followed by the superb voice while the two wayfarers and all the world around them waited, breathless and enchained.  At the end, Banneker said dreamily: 

“I’ve never heard anything like that before.  It says everything that can’t be said in words alone, doesn’t it?  It makes me think of something—­What is it?” He groped for a moment, then repeated: 

“’A passionate ballad, gallant and gay, Singing afar in the springtime of life, Singing of youth and of love And of honor that cannot die.’”

Io drew a deep, tremulous breath.  “Yes; it’s like that.  What a voice!  And what an art to be buried out here!  It’s one of her own songs, I think.  Probably an unpublished one.”

“Her own?  Does she write music?”

“She is Royce Melvin, the composer.  Does that mean anything to you?”

He shook his head.

“Some day it will.  They say that he—­every one thinks it’s a he—­will take Massenet’s place as a lyrical composer.  I found her out by accidentally coming on the manuscript of a Melvin song that I knew.  That’s her secret that I spoke of.  Do you mind my having told you?”

“Why, no.  It’ll never go any further.  I wonder why she never told me.  And why she keeps so shut off from the world here.”

“Ah; that’s another secret, and one that I shan’t tell you,” returned Io gravely.  “There’s the piano again.”

A few indeterminate chords came to their ears.  There followed a jangling disharmony.  They waited, but there was nothing more.  They rode on.

At the lodge Banneker took the horses around while Io went in.  Immediately her voice, with a note of alarm in it, summoned him.  He found her bending over Miss Van Arsdale, who lay across the divan in the living-room with eyes closed, breathing jerkily.  Her lips were blue and her hands looked shockingly lifeless.