explained and diagrammed Bible without fearing that I have designs on your soul?”
“Yes.”
“And will you please go back to your work at once, and by and by take me home and stay to supper? Miss Van Arsdale told me to ask you.”
“All right. I’ll be glad to. What will you do between now and four o’clock?”
“Prowl in your library and unearth more of your secrets.”
“You’re welcome if you can find any. I don’t deal in ’em.”
When Banneker, released from his duties until evening train time, rejoined her, and they were riding along the forest trail, he said:
“You’ve started me to theorizing about myself.”
“Do it aloud,” she invited.
“Well; all my boyhood I led a wandering life, as you know. We were never anywhere as much as a month at a time. In a way, I liked the change and adventure. In another way, I got dead sick of it. Don’t you suppose that my readiness to settle down and vegetate is the reaction from that?”
“It sounds reasonable enough. You might put it more simply by saying that you were tired. But by now you ought to be rested.”
“Therefore I ought to be stirring myself so as to get tired again?”
“If you don’t stir, you’ll rust.”
“Rust is a painless death for useless mechanism.”
She shot an impatient side-glance at him. “Either you’re a hundred years old,” she said, “or that’s sheer pose.”
“Perhaps it is a sort of pose. If so, it’s a self-protective one.”
“Suppose I asked you to come to New York?”
Intrepid though she was, her soul quaked a little at her own words, foreseeing those mail-order-cut clothes and the resolute butterflyness of the tie greeting her on Fifth Avenue.
“What to do?”
“Sell tickets at the Grand Central Station, of course!” she shot back at him. “Ban, you are aggravating! ‘What to do?’ Father would find you some sort of place while you were fitting in.”
No. I wouldn’t take a job from you any more than I’d take anything else.”
“You carry principles to the length of absurdity. Come and get your own job, then. You’re not timid, are you?”
“Not particularly. I’m just contented.”
At that provocation her femininity flared. “Ban,” she cried with exasperation and appeal enchantingly mingled, “aren’t you going to miss me at all when I go?”
“I’ve been trying not to think of that,” he said slowly.
“Well, think of it,” she breathed. “No!” she contradicted herself passionately. “Don’t think of it. I shouldn’t have said that. … I don’t know what is the matter with me to-day, Ban. Perhaps I am fey.” She smiled to him slantwise.
“It’s the air,” he answered judicially. “There’s another storm brewing somewhere or I’m no guesser. More trouble for the schedule.”
“That’s right!” she cried eagerly. “Be the Atkinson and St. Philip station-agent again. Let’s talk about trains. It’s—it’s so reliable.”
“Far from it on this line,” he answered, adopting her light tone. “Particularly if we have more rain. You may become a permanent resident yet.”
Some rods short of the Van Arsdale cabin the trail took a sharp turn amidst the brush. Halfway on the curve Io caught at Banneker’s near rein.
“Hark!” she exclaimed.
The notes of a piano sounded faintly clear in the stillness. As the harmonies dissolved and merged, a voice rose above them, resonant and glorious, rose and sank and pleaded and laughed and loved, while the two young listeners leaned unconsciously toward each other in their saddles. Silence fell again. The very forest life itself seemed hushed in a listening trance.
“Heavens!” whispered Banneker. “Who is it?”
“Camilla Van Arsdale, of course. Didn’t you know?”
“I knew she was musical. I didn’t know she had a voice like that.”
“Ten years ago New York was wild over it.”
“But why—”
“Hush! She’s beginning again.”
Once more the sweep of the chords was followed by the superb voice while the two wayfarers and all the world around them waited, breathless and enchained. At the end, Banneker said dreamily:
“I’ve never heard anything like that before. It says everything that can’t be said in words alone, doesn’t it? It makes me think of something—What is it?” He groped for a moment, then repeated:
“ ‘A passionate ballad, gallant and gay, Singing afar in the springtime of life, Singing of youth and of love And of honor that cannot die.’ ”
Io drew a deep, tremulous breath. “Yes; it’s like that. What a voice! And what an art to be buried out here! It’s one of her own songs, I think. Probably an unpublished one.”
“Her own? Does she write music?”
“She is Royce Melvin, the composer. Does that mean anything to you?”
He shook his head.
“Some day it will. They say that he—every one thinks it’s a he—will take Massenet’s place as a lyrical composer. I found her out by accidentally coming on the manuscript of a Melvin song that I knew. That’s her secret that I spoke of. Do you mind my having told you?”
“Why, no. It’ll never go any further. I wonder why she never told me. And why she keeps so shut off from the world here.”
“Ah; that’s another secret, and one that I shan’t tell you,” returned Io gravely. “There’s the piano again.”
A few indeterminate chords came to their ears. There followed a jangling disharmony. They waited, but there was nothing more. They rode on.
At the lodge Banneker took the horses around while Io went in. Immediately her voice, with a note of alarm in it, summoned him. He found her bending over Miss Van Arsdale, who lay across the divan in the living-room with eyes closed, breathing jerkily. Her lips were blue and her hands looked shockingly lifeless.
“Carry her into her room,” directed Io.
Banneker picked up the tall, strong-built form without effort and deposited it on the bed in the inner room.
“Open all the windows,” commanded the girl. “See if you can find me some ammonia or camphor. Quick! She looks as if she were dying.”
One after another Banneker tried the bottles on the dresser. “Here it is. Ammonia,” he said.
In his eagerness he knocked a silver-mounted photograph to the floor. He thrust the drug into the girl’s hand and watched her helplessly as she worked over the limp figure on the bed. Mechanically he picked up the fallen picture to replace it. There looked out at him the face of a man of early middle age, a face of manifest intellectual power, high-boned, long-lined, and of the austere, almost ascetic beauty which the Florentine coins have preserved for us in clear fidelity. Across the bottom was written in a peculiarly rhythmic script, the legend:
“Toujours à toi. W.”
“She’s coming back,” said Io’s voice. “No. Don’t come nearer. You’ll shut off the air. Find me a fan.”
He