Over and over he read it with increasing bewilderment, with increasing fear, with slow-developing comprehension. If that was to be her farewell ... but why! Io, the straightforward, the intrepid, the exponent of fair play and the rules of the game!... Had it been only a game? No; at least he knew better than that.
What could it all mean? Why that medium for her message? Should he write and ask her? But what was there to ask or say, in the face of her silence? Besides, he had not even her address. Miss Camilla could doubtless give him that. But would she? How much did she understand? Why had she turned so unhelpful?
Banneker sat with his problem half through a searing night; and the other half of the night he spent in writing. But not to Io.
At noon Camilla Van Arsdale rode up to the station.
“Are you ill, Ban?” was her greeting, as soon as she saw his face.
“No, Miss Camilla. I’m going away.”
She nodded, confirming not so much what he said as a fulfilled suspicion of her own. “New York is a very big city,” she said.
“I haven’t said that I was going to New York.”
“No; there is much you haven’t said.”
“I haven’t felt much like talking. Even to you.”