)
"But when you can, you'll go back and help him, even if I'm not here to
know about it, won't you?"
"Oh, yes: I'll go back to help him when I can," he promised, as heartily
as if he had not made the same promise each time that the subject came
up. There was still a good deal of the wistful child about the dying
woman.
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.
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