Hour after hour (wrote Io) she sits at the piano and makes her wonderful music, and tries to write it down.  There I can be of very little help to her.  Then she will go back into her room and lie on the big couch near the window where the young, low pines brush the wall, with Cousin Billy’s photograph in her hands, and be so deathly quiet that I sometimes get frightened and creep up to the door to peer in and be sure that she is all right.  To-day when I looked in at the door I heard her say, quite softly to herself:  “I shall die without seeing his face again.”  I had to hold my breath and run out into the forest.  Ban, I didn’t know that it was in me to cry so—­not since that night on the train when I left you....  This all seems so wicked and wrong and—­yes—­wasteful.  Think of what these two splendid people could be to each other!  She craves him so, Ban; just the sound of his voice, a word from him; but she won’t break her own word.  Sometimes I think I shall do it.  Write me all you can about him, Ban, and send papers:  all the political matter.  You can’t imagine what it is to her only to hear about him.

So Banneker had clippings collected, wrote a little daily political bulletin for Io; even went out of his way editorially to pay an occasional handsome tribute to Judge Enderby’s personal character, whilst adducing cogent reasons why, as the “Wall Street and traction candidate,” he should be defeated.  But his personal opinion, expressed for the behoof of his correspondents in Manzanita, was that he probably could not be defeated; that his brilliant and aggressive campaign was forcing Marrineal to a defensive and losing fight.

“It is a great asset in politics,” wrote Banneker to Miss Camilla, “to have nothing to hide or explain.  If we’re going to be licked, there is no man in the world whom I’d as gladly have win as Judge Enderby.”

All this, of course, in the manner of one having interesting political news of no special import to the receiver of the news, to deliver; and quite without suggestion of any knowledge regarding her personal concern in the matter.

But between the lines of Io’s letters, full of womanly pity for Camilla Van Arsdale, of resentment for her thwarted and hopeless longing, Banneker thought to discern a crystallizing resolution.  It would be so like Io’s imperious temper to take the decision into her own hands, to bring about a meeting between the long-sundered lovers, to cast into the lonely and valiant woman’s darkening life one brief and splendid glow of warmth and radiance.  For to Io, a summons for Willis Enderby to come would be no more than a defiance of the conventions.  She knew nothing of the ruinous vengeance awaiting any breach of faith on his part, at the hands of a virulent and embittered wife; she did not even know that his coming would be a specific breach of faith, for Banneker, withheld by his promise of secrecy to Russell Edmonds, had never told her.  Nor had