ers 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
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 t