To that offer had come no
answer; later she had had a letter curiously reticent as to Willis
Enderby. (Banneker, in his epistolary personification of Miss Van
Arsdale had been perhaps overcautious on this point.) Io began to piece
together hints and clues, as in a disjected puzzle:--Banneker's presence
in Manzanita--Camilla's blindness.--Her inability to know, except
through the medium of others, the course of events.--The bewildering
reticence and hiatuses in the infrequent letters from Manzanita,
particularly in regard to Willis Enderby.--This calm, sane, cheerful
view of him as a living being, a present figure in his old field of
action.--The casual mention in an early letter that all of Miss Van
Arsdale's reading and most of her writing was done through the nurse or
Banneker, mainly the latter, though she was mastering the art of
touch-writing on the typewriter. The very style of the earlier letters,
as she remembered them, was different. And just here flashed the thought
which set her feverishly ransacking the portfolio in which she kept her
old correspondence. There she found an envelope with a Manzanita
postmark dated four months earlier. The typing of the two letters was
not the same.
Groping for some aid in the murk, Io went to the telephone and called up
the editorial office of The Sphere, asking for Russell Edmonds.
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