520
rately.
"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."
"Suppose it turned out that this were really the right path for you to travel," she said after a pause; "that you were going to do bigger things here than you ever could do with The Patriot? I believe it's going to be so, Ban; that what you are doing now is going to be your true success."
"Success!" he cried. "Are you going to preach success to me? If ever there was a word coined in hell--I'm sorry, Miss Camilla," he broke off, mastering himself.
She groped her way to the piano, and ran her fingers over the keys. "There is work, anyway," she said with sure serenity.
"Yes; there's work, thank God!"
Work enough there was for him, not only in his writing, for which he had recovered the capacity after a long period of stunned inaction, but in the constant and unwearied labor of love in building and rebuilding, fortifying and extending, that precarious but still impregnable bulwark of falsehood beneath whose protection Camilla Van Arsdale lived and was happy and made the magic of her song. Illusion! Banneker wondered whether any happiness were other than illusion, whether the illusion of happiness were not better than any reality. But in the world of grim fact which he had accepted for himself was no palliating mirage. Upon him "the illusive eyes of hope" were closed.
While Banneker was practicing his elaborate dece