In the late afternoon of the day after the collapse, while Io was heating water at the fireplace, she heard a drawer open in the sick-room and hurried back to find Miss Van Arsdale hanging to the dresser, her face gray-splotched and her fingers convulsively crushing a letter which she had taken from under lock.  Alarmed and angry, the amateur nurse got her back to bed only half conscious, but still cherishing her trove.  When, an hour later, she dared leave her charge, she heard the rustle of smoothed-out paper and remained outside long enough to allow for the reading.  On her return there was no sign of the letter.  Miss Van Arsdale, a faint and hopeful color in her cheeks, was asleep.

For Banneker these were days of trial and tribulation.  Added to the anxiety that he felt for his best friend was the uncertainty as to what he ought to do about the developments affecting her guest.  For he had heard once more from Gardner.

“It’s on the cards,” wrote the reporter, “that I may be up to see you again.  I’m still working, on and off, on the tip that took me on that wild-goose chase.  If I come again I won’t quit without some of the wild goose’s tail feathers, at least.  There’s a new tip locally; it leaked out from Paradise. ["The Babbling Babson,” interjected the reader mentally.] It looks as though the bird were still out your way.  Though how she could be, and you not know it, gets me.  It’s even a bigger game than Stella Wrightington, if my information is O.K.  Have you heard or seen anything lately of a Beautiful Stranger or anything like that around Manzanita?...  I enclose clipping of your story.  What do you think of yourself in print?”

Banneker thought quite highly of himself in print as he read the article, which he immediately did.  The other matter could wait; not that it was less important; quite the contrary; but he proposed to mull it over carefully and with a quiet mind, if he could ever get his mind back to its peaceful current again:  meantime it was good for him to think of something quite dissociated from the main problem.

What writer has not felt the conscious red tingle in his cheeks at first sight of himself in the magnified personification of type?  Here is something, once himself, now expanded far beyond individual limits, into the proportions of publicity, for all the world to measure and estimate and criticize.  Ought it to have been done in just that way?  Is there not too much “I” in the presentation?  Would not the effect have been greater had the method been less personal?  It seemed to Banneker that he himself stood forth in a stark nakedness of soul and thought, through those blatantly assertive words, shameless, challenging to public opinion, yet delightful to his own appreciation.  On the whole it was good; better than he would have thought he could do.