“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