...  Why didn’t she write?  A word!  Anything!

...  Had she written Miss Van Arsdale?

At first it was intolerable that he should be driven to ask about her from any other person; about Io, who had clasped him in the Valley of the Shadow, whose lips had made the imminence of death seem a light thing!  The Hunger drove him to it.

Yes; Miss Van Arsdale had heard.  Io Welland was in New York, and well. 
That was all.  But Banneker felt an undermining reserve.

Long days of changeless sunlight on the desert, an intolerable glare.  From the doorway of the lonely station Banneker stared out over leagues of sand and cactus, arid, sterile, hopeless, promiseless.  Life was like that.  Four weeks now since Io had left him.  And still, except for the Bible, no word from her.  No sign.  Silence.

Why that?  Anything but that!  It was too unbearable to his helpless masculine need of her.  He could not understand it.  He could not understand anything.  Except the Hunger.  That he understood well enough now....

At two o’clock of a savagely haunted night, Banneker staggered from his cot.  For weeks he had not known sleep otherwise than in fitful passages.  His brain was hot and blank.  Although the room was pitch-dark, he crossed it unerringly to a shelf and look down his revolver.  Slipping on overcoat and shoes, he dropped the weapon into his pocket and set out up the railroad track.  A half-mile he covered before turning into the desert.  There he wandered aimlessly for a few minutes, and after that groped his way, guarding with a stick against the surrounding threat of the cactus, for his eyes were tight closed.  Still blind, he drew out the pistol, gripped it by the barrel, and threw it, whirling high and far, into the trackless waste.  He passed on, feeling his uncertain way patiently.

It took him a quarter of an hour to find the railroad track and set a sure course for home, so effectually had he lost himself....  No chance of his recovering that old friend.  It had been whispering to him, in the blackness of empty nights, counsels that were too persuasive.

Back in his room over the station he lighted the lamp and stood before the few books which he kept with him there; among them Io’s Bible and “The Undying Voices,” with the two pages still joined as her fingers had left them.  He was summoning his courage to face what might be the final solution.  When he must, she had said, he was to open and read.  Well ... he must.  He could bear it no longer, the wordless uncertainty.  He lifted down the volume, gently parted the fastened pages and read.  From out the still, ordered lines, there rose to him the passionate cry of protest and bereavement: