“You mind your own business, Tommy,” said Banneker placidly.  “Our friend the Joss will stick his foot into a gopher hole yet.”

The assignment that afforded Banneker his chance was of the most unpromising.  An old builder, something of a local character over in the Corlears Hook vicinity, had died.  The Ledger, Mr. Greenough informed Banneker, in his dry, polite manner, wanted “a sufficient obit” of the deceased.  Banneker went to the queer, decrepit frame cottage at the address given, and there found a group of old Sam Corpenshire’s congeners, in solemn conclave over the dead.  They welcomed the reporter, and gave him a ceremonial drink of whiskey, highly superior whiskey.  They were glad that he had come to write of their dead friend.  If ever a man deserved a good write-up, it was Sam Corpenshire.  From one mouth to another they passed the word of his shrewd dealings, of his good-will to his neighbors, of his ripe judgment, of his friendliness to all sound things and sound men, of his shy, sly charities, of the thwarted romance, which, many years before, had left him lonely but unembittered; and out of it Banneker, with pen too slow for his eager will, wove not a two-stick obit, but a rounded column shot through with lights that played upon the little group of characters, the living around the dead, like sunshine upon an ancient garden.

Even Mr. Greenough congratulated Banneker, the next morning.  In the afternoon mail came a note from Mr. Gaines of The New Era monthly.  That perspicuous editor had instantly identified the style of the article with that of the “Eban” series, part of which he had read in typograph.  He wrote briefly but warmly of the work:  and would the writer not call and see him soon?

Perhaps the reporter might have accepted the significant invitation promptly, as he at first intended.  But on the following morning he found in his box an envelope under French stamp, inscribed with writing which, though he had seen but two specimens of it, drove everything else out of his tumultuous thoughts.  He took it, not to his desk, but to a side room of the art department, unoccupied at that hour, and opened it with chilled and fumbling hands.

Within was a newspaper clipping, from a Paris edition of an American daily.  It gave a brief outline of the battle on the pier.  In pencil on the margin were these words: 

“Do you remember practicing, that day, among the pines?  I’m so proud!  Io.”

He read it again.  The last sentence affected him with a sensation of dizziness.  Proud!  Of his deed!  It gave him the feeling that she had reclaimed, reappropriated him.  No!  That she had never for a moment released him.  In a great surge, sweeping through his veins, he felt the pressure of her breast against his, the strong enfoldment of her arms, her breath upon his lips.  He tore envelope and clipping into fragments.

By one of those strange associations of linked memory, such as “clangs and flashes for a drowning man,” he sharply recalled where he had seen Willis Enderby before.  His was the face in the photograph to which Camilla Van Arsdale had turned when death stretched out a hand toward her.