had done his best. Ives was
fair-minded; he saw it. Ives was a man of judgment. Therefore, when he
suggested bed, he must be right. Very weary, Banneker was. He felt very,
very wretched about Enderby. He'd explain it all to Enderby in the
morning--no: couldn't do that, though. Enderby was dead. Queer idea,
that! What was it that violent-minded idiot, Pop Edmonds, had said? He'd
settle with Pop in the morning. Now he'd go to sleep....

He woke to utter misery. In the first mail came the letter, now
expected, from Io. It completed the catastrophe in which his every hope
was swept away.

I have tried to make myself believe (she wrote) that you could not have
Betrayed him; that you would not, at least, have let me, who loved you,
be, unknowingly, the agent of his destruction. But the black record comes
back to me. The Harvey Wheelwright editorial, which seemed so light a
thing, then. The lie that beat Robert Laird. The editorial that you dared
not print, after promising. All of one piece. How could I ever have
trusted you!

Oh, Ban, Ban! When I think of what we have been to each other; how
gladly, how proudly, I gave myself to you, to find you unfaithful! Is
that the price of success? And unfaithful in such a way! If you had been
untrue to me in the conventional sense, I think it would have been a
small matter compared to this betrayal. That would have been a thing of
the senses, a wound to the lesser part of our love. But this--Couldn't
you see that our relation demanded more of faith, of fidelity, than
marriage, to justify it and sustain it; more idealism, more truth, more
loyalty to what we were to each other? And now this!

If it were I alone that you have betrayed, I could bear my own remorse;
perhaps even think it retribution for what I have done. But how can
I--and how can you--bear the remorse of the disaster that will fall upon
Camilla Van Arsdale, your truest friend? What is there left to her, now
that the man she loves is to be hounded out of public life by
blackmailers? I have not told her. I have not been able to tell her.
Perhaps he will write her, himself. How can she bear it! I am going away,
leaving a companion in charge of her.

Camilla Van Arsdale! One last drop of bitterness in the cup of suffering.
Neither she nor Io had, of course, learned of Enderby's death, and could
not for several days, until the newspapers reached them. Banneker
perceived clearly the thing that was laid upon him to do. He mus