ce again,
Miss Van Arsdale read there a sick and floundering skepticism.

"Married!" he repeated. "Io! She couldn't."

The woman, startled by the conviction in his tone, wondered how much
that might imply.

"She wrote me," said she presently.

"That she was married?"

"That she would be by the time the letter reached me."

("You will think me a fool," the girl had written impetuously, "and
perhaps a cruel fool. But it is the wise thing, really. Del Eyre is so
safe! He is safety itself for a girl like me. And I have discovered that
I can't wholly trust myself.... Be gentle with him, and make him do
something worth while.")

"Ah!" said Ban. "But that--"

"And I have the newspaper since with an account of the wedding.... Ban!
Don't look like that!"

"Like what?" said he stupidly.

"You look like Pretty Willie as I saw him when he was working himself up
for the killing." Pretty Willie was the soft-eyed young desperado who
had cleaned out the Sick Coyote.

"Oh, I'm not going to kill anybody," he said with a touch of grim
amusement for her fears. "Not even myself." He rose and went to the
door. "Do you mind, Miss Camilla?" he added appealingly.

"You want me to leave you now?"

He nodded. "I've got to think."

"When would you leave, Ban, if you do go?"

"I don't know."

On the following morning he went, after a night spent in arranging,
destroying, and burning. The last thing to go into the stove, 67 S 4230,
was a lock of hair, once glossy, but now stiffened and stained a dull
brown, which he had cut from the wound on Io's head that first, strange
night of theirs, the stain of her blood that had beaten in her heart,
and given life to the sure, sweet motion of her limbs, and flushed in
her cheeks, and pulsed in the warm lips that she had pressed to his--Why
could they not have died together on their dissolving island, with the
night about them, and their last, failing sentience for each other!

The flame of the greedy stove licked up the memento, but not the memory.

"You must not worry about me," he wrote in the note left with his
successor for Miss Van Arsdale. "I shall be all right. I am going to
succeed."

PART II

THE VISION

CHAPTER I

Mrs. Brashear's rooming-house on Grove Street wore its air of
respectability like a garment, clean and somber, in an environment of
careful behavior. Greenwich Village, not having fully awakened to the
commercial advantages of being a _locale_,