Out from that forest hermitage where the two worked, one in serene though longing happiness, the other under the stern discipline of loss and self-abnegation, had poured, in six short months, a living current of song which had lifted the fame of Royce Melvin to new heights:  her fame only, for Banneker would not use his name to the words that rang with a pure and vivid melody of their own.  Herein, too, he was paying his debt to Willis Enderby, through the genius of the woman who loved him; preserving that genius with the thin, lustrous, impregnable fiction of his own making against threatening and impotent truth.

Once, when Banneker had brought her a lyric, alive with the sweetness of youth and love in the great open spaces, she had said: 

“Ban, shall we call it ‘Io?’”

“I don’t think it would do,” he said with an effort.

“Where is she?”

“Traveling in the tropics.”

“You try so hard to keep the sadness out of your voice when you speak of her,” said Camilla sorrowfully.  “But it’s always there.  Isn’t there anything I can do?”

“Nothing.  There’s nothing anybody can do.”

The blind woman hesitated.  “But you care for her still, don’t you, Ban?”

“Care!  Oh, my God!” whispered Banneker.

“And she cares.  I know she cared when she was here.  Io isn’t the kind of woman to forget easily.  She tried once, you know.”  Miss Van Arsdale smiled wanly.  “Why doesn’t she ever say anything of you in her letters?”

“She does.”

“Very little.” (Io’s letters, passing through Banneker’s hands were carefully censored, of necessity, to forefend any allusion to the tragedy of Willis Enderby, often to the extent of being rewritten complete.  It now occurred to Banneker that he had perhaps overdone the matter of keeping his own name out of them.) “Ban,” she continued wistfully, “you haven’t quarreled, have you?”

“No, Miss Camilla.  We haven’t quarreled.”

“Then what is it, Ban?  I don’t want to pry; you know me well enough to be sure of that.  But if I could only know before the end comes that you two—­I wish I could read your face.  It’s a helpless thing, being blind.”  This was as near a complaint as he had ever heard her utter.

“Io’s a rich woman, Miss Camilla,” he said desperately.

“What of it?”

“How could I ask her to marry a jobless, half-lunged derelict?”

“Have you asked her?”

He was silent.

“Ban, does she know why you’re here?”

“Oh, yes; she knows.”

“How bitter and desolate your voice sounds when you say that!  And you want me to believe that she knows and still doesn’t come to you?”

“She doesn’t know that I’m—­ill,” he said, hating himself for the necessity of pretense with Camilla Van Arsdale.

“Then I shall tell her.”

“No,” he controverted with finality, “I won’t allow it.”