ice steady.

"There have been too many good-byes between us," she murmured.

He lifted his head, attentive to a stir at the door, which immediately
passed.

"I thought that was Archie, come after you."

"Archie isn't coming."

"Then I'll send for the car and take you home."

"Won't you understand, Ban? I'm not going home."

CHAPTER IX

Io Eyre was one of those women before whom Scandal seems to lose its
teeth if not its tongue. She had always assumed the superb attitude
toward the world in which she moved. "They say?--What do they say?--Let
them say!" might have been her device, too genuinely expressive of her
to be consciously contemptuous. Where another might have suffered in
reputation by constant companionship with a man as brilliant, as
conspicuous, as phenomenal of career as Errol Banneker, Io passed on her
chosen way, serene and scatheless.

Tongues wagged, indeed; whispers spread; that was inevitable. But to
this Io was impervious. When Banneker, troubled lest any breath should
sully her reputation who was herself unsullied, in his mind, would have
advocated caution, she refused to consent.

"Why should I skulk?" she said. "I'm not ashamed."

So they met and lunched or dined at the most conspicuous restaurants,
defying Scandal, whereupon Scandal began to wonder whether, all things
considered, there were anything more to it than one of those flirtations
which, after a time of faithful adherence, become standardized into
respectability and a sort of tolerant recognition. What, after all, is
respectability but the brand of the formalist upon standardization?

With the distaste and effort which Ban always felt in mentioning her
husband's name to Io, he asked her one day about any possible danger
from Eyre.

"No," she said with assurance. "I owe Del nothing. That is understood
between us."

"But if the tittle-tattle that must be going the rounds should come to
his ears--"

"If the truth should come to his ears," she replied tranquilly, "it
would make no difference."

Ban looked at her, hesitant to be convinced.

"Yes; it's so," she asseverated, nodding, "After his outbreak in
Paris--it was on our wedding trip--I gave him a choice. I would either
divorce him, or I would hold myself absolutely free of him so far as any
claim, actual or moral, went. The one thing I undertook was that I would
never involve his name in any open scandal."

"He hasn't been so particular," said Ban gloomily.