“............ that Lady Beauty in whose praise
The voice and hand shake still”—­

but there was something about her withdrawn, aloof of spirit, which he dared not override or even challenge.  She spoke briefly of Eyre, without any pretense of great sorrow, dwelling with a kindled eye on that which she had found admirable in him; his high and steadfast courage through atrocious suffering until darkness settled down on his mind.  Her own plans were definite; she was going away with the elder Mrs. Eyre to a rest resort.  Of The Patriot and its progress she talked with interest, but her questions were general and did not touch upon the matter of the surrendered editorial.  Was she purposely avoiding it or had it passed from her mind in the stress of more personal events?  Banneker would have liked to know, but deemed it better not to ask.  Once he tried to elicit from her some indication of when she would marry him; but from this decision she exhibited a covert and inexplicable shrinking.  This he might attribute, if he chose, to that innate and sound formalism which would always lead her to observe the rules of the game; if from no special respect for them as such, then out of deference to the prejudices of others.  Nevertheless, he experienced a gnawing uncertainty, amounting to a half-confessed dread.

Yet, at the moment of parting, she came to his arms, clung to him, gave him her lips passionately, longingly; bade him write, for his letters would be all that there was to keep life radiant for her....

Through some perverse kink in his mental processes, he found it difficult to write to Io, in the succeeding weeks and months, during which she devotedly accompanied the failing Mrs. Eyre from rest cure to sanitarium, about his work on The Patriot.  That interplay of interest between them in his editorial plans and purposes, which had so stimulated and inspired him, was checked.  The mutual current had ceased to flash; at least, so he felt.  Had the wretched affair of his forfeited promise in the matter of the strike announcement destroyed one bond between them?  Even were this true, there were other bonds, of the spirit and therefore irrefragable, to hold her to him; thus he comforted his anxious hopes.

Because their community of interest in his work had lapsed, Banneker found the savor oozing out of his toil.  Monotony sang its dispiriting drone in his ears.  He flung himself into polo with reawakened vim, and roused the hopes of The Retreat for the coming season, until an unlucky spill broke two ribs and dislocated a shoulder.  Restless in the physical idleness of his mending days, he took to drifting about in the whirls and ripples and backwaters of the city life, out of which wanderings grew a new series of the “Vagrancies,” more quaint and delicate and trenchant than the originals because done with a pen under perfected mastery, without losing anything of the earlier simplicity and sympathy.  In this work, Banneker found relief; and in Io’s delight in it, a reflected joy that lent fresh impetus to his special genius.  The Great Gaines enthusiastically accepted the new sketches for his magazine.