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 Arsdale and Willis Enderby, she would resistlessly follow the impulse born and matured of her own passion.  Had she not once before denied love ... and to what end of suffering and bitter enlightenment and long waiting not yet ended!  Yes; she would send for Willis Enderby.

Thus, with the insight of love, he read the heart of the loved one.  Self-interest lifted its specious voice now, in contravention.  If she did send, and if Judge Enderby went to Camilla Van Arsdale, as Banneker knew surely that he would, and if Ely Ives’s spies discovered it, the way was made plain and peaceful for Banneker.  For, in that case, the blunderbuss of blackmail would be held to Enderby’s head:  he must, perforce, retire from the race on whatever pretext he might devise, under threat of a scandal which, in any case, would drive him out of public life.  Marrineal would be nominated, probably elected; control of The Patriot would pass into Banneker’s hands; The Searchlight would thus be held at bay until he and Io were married, for he could not really doubt that she would marry him, even though there lay between them an unexplained doubt and a seeming betrayal; and he could remould the distorted and debased policies of The Patriot to his heart’s desire of an honest newspaper fearlessly presenting and supporting truth as he saw it.

All this at no price of treachery; merely by leaving matters which were, in fact, no concern of his, to the arbitrament of whatever fates might concern themselves with such troublous matters; it was just a matter of minding his own business and assuming that Io Eyre would do likewise.  So argued self-interest, plausible, persuasive.  He went to bed with the argument still unsettled, and, because it seethed in his mind, reached out to his reading-stand to cool his brain with the limpid philosophies of Stevenson’s “Virginibus Puerisque.”