hoped for better results in future.

"But he's Io's passion-in-the-desert right enough," said the irreverent
Miss Forbes.

Banneker sat long over his cooling coffee. Through haunted nights he had
fought maddening memories of Io's shadowed eyes, of the exhalant,
irresistible femininity of her, of the pulses of her heart against his
on that wild and wonderful night in the flood; and he had won to an
armed peace, in which the outposts of his spirit were ever on guard
against the recurrent thoughts of her.

Now, at the bitter music of her name on the lips of a gossiping and
frivolous girl, the barriers had given away. In eagerness and
self-contempt he surrendered to the vision. Go to an afternoon tea to
see and speak with her again? He would, in that awakened mood, have
walked across the continent, only to be in her presence, to feel himself
once more within the radius of that inexorable charm.




CHAPTER VII


"Katie's" sits, sedate and serviceable, on a narrow side street so near
to Park Row that the big table in the rear rattles its dishes when the
presses begin their seismic rumblings, in the daily effort to shake the
world. Here gather the pick and choice of New York journalism, while
still on duty, to eat and drink and discuss the inner news of things