the devious tangle of the maze wherein she and Banneker, Camilla Van Arsdale and Willis Enderby had been so tragically involved, and as she patiently studied the letter as possible guide there dawned within her a glint of the truth.  It began with the suspicion, soon growing to conviction, that the writer of those inexplicable words was not, could not be insane; the letter breathed a clarity of mind, an untroubled simplicity of heart, a quiet undertone of happiness, impossible to reconcile with the picture of a shattered and grief-stricken victim.  Yet Io had, herself, written to Miss Van Arsdale as soon as she knew of Judge Enderby’s death, pouring out her heart for the sorrow of the woman who as a stranger had stood her friend, whom, as she learned to know her in the close companionship of her affliction, she had come to love; offering to return at once to Manzanita.  To that offer had come no answer; later she had had a letter curiously reticent as to Willis Enderby. (Banneker, in his epistolary personification of Miss Van Arsdale had been perhaps overcautious on this point.) Io began to piece together hints and clues, as in a disjected puzzle:—­Banneker’s presence in Manzanita—­Camilla’s blindness.—­Her inability to know, except through the medium of others, the course of events.—­The bewildering reticence and hiatuses in the infrequent letters from Manzanita, particularly in regard to Willis Enderby.—­This calm, sane, cheerful view of him as a living being, a present figure in his old field of action.—­The casual mention in an early letter that all of Miss Van Arsdale’s reading and most of her writing was done through the nurse or Banneker, mainly the latter, though she was mastering the art of touch-writing on the typewriter.  The very style of the earlier letters, as she remembered them, was different.  And just here flashed the thought which set her feverishly ransacking the portfolio in which she kept her old correspondence.  There she found an envelope with a Manzanita postmark dated four months earlier.  The typing of the two letters was not the same.

Groping for some aid in the murk, Io went to the telephone and called up the editorial office of The Sphere, asking for Russell Edmonds.  Within two hours the veteran had come to her.

“I have been wanting to see you,” he said at once.

“About Mr. Banneker?” she queried eagerly.

“No.  About The Searchlight.”

“The Searchlight?  I don’t understand, Mr. Edmonds.”

“Can’t we be open with each other, Mrs. Eyre?”

“Absolutely, so far as I am concerned.”

“Then I want to tell you that you need have no fear as to what The Searchlight may do.”

“Still I don’t understand.  Why should I fear it?”

“The scandal—­manufactured, of course—­which The Searchlight had cooked up about you and Mr. Banneker before Mr. Eyre’s death.”

“Surely there was never anything published.  I should have heard of it.”