g to hide or explain. If we're going to be licked, there is
no man in the world whom I'd as gladly have win as Judge Enderby."

All this, of course, in the manner of one having interesting political
news of no special import to the receiver of the news, to deliver; and
quite without suggestion of any knowledge regarding her personal concern
in the matter.

But between the lines of Io's letters, full of womanly pity for Camilla
Van Arsdale, of resentment for her thwarted and hopeless longing,
Banneker thought to discern a crystallizing resolution. It would be so
like Io's imperious temper to take the decision into her own hands, to
bring about a meeting between the long-sundered lovers, to cast into the
lonely and valiant woman's darkening life one brief and splendid glow of
warmth and radiance. For to Io, a summons for Willis Enderby to come
would be no more than a defiance of the conventions. She knew nothing of
the ruinous vengeance awaiting any breach of faith on his part, at the
hands of a virulent and embittered wife; she did not even know that his
coming would be a specific breach of faith, for Banneker, withheld by
his promise of secrecy to Russell Edmonds, had never told her. Nor had
he betrayed to her the espionage under which Enderby constantly moved;
he shrank, naturally, from adding so ignoble an item to the weight of
disrepute under which The Patriot already lay, in her mind. Sooner or
later he must face the question from her of why he had not resigned
rather than put his honor in pawn to the baser uses of the newspaper and
its owner's ambitions. To that question there could be no answer. He
could not throw the onus of it upon her, by revealing to her that the
necessity of protecting her name against the befoulment of The
Searchlight was the compelling motive of his passivity. That was not
within Banneker's code.

What, meantime, should be his course? Should he write and warn Io about
Enderby? Could he make himself explicable without explaining too much?
After all, what right had he to assume that she would gratuitously
intermeddle in the disastrous fates of others? A rigorous respect for
the rights of privacy was written into the rules of the game as she
played it. He argued, with logic irrefutable as it was unconvincing,
that this alone ought to stay her hand; yet he knew, by the power of
their own yearning, one for the other, that in the great cause of love,
whether for themselves or for Camilla Van Ar