Sun-lulled into immobility, the desert around the lonely little station of Manzanita smouldered and slumbered. Nothing was visibly changed from five years before, when Banneker left, except that another agent, a disillusioned-appearing young man with a corn-colored mustache, came forth to meet the slow noon local, chuffing pantingly in under a bad head of alkali-water steam. A lone passenger, obviously Eastern in mien and garb, disembarked, and was welcomed by a dark, beautiful, harassed-looking girl who had just ridden in on a lathered pony. The agent, a hopeful soul, ambled within earshot.
"How is she?" he heard the man say, with the intensity of a single thought, as the girl took his hand. Her reply came, encouragingly.
"As brave as ever. Stronger, a little, I think."
"And she--the eyes?"
"She will be able to see you; but not clearly."
"How long--" began the man, but his voice broke. He shook in the bitter heat as if from some inner and deadly chill.
"Nobody can tell. She hoards her sight."
"To see me?" he cried eagerly. "Have you told her?"
"No."
"Is that wise?" he questioned. "The shock--"
"I think that she suspects; she senses your coming. Her face has the rapt expression that I have seen only when she plays. Has had since you started. Yet there is no possible way in which she could have learned."
"That is very wonderful," said the stranger, in a hushed voice. Then, hesitantly, "What shall I do, Io?"
"Nothing," came the girl's clear answer. "Go to her, that is all."
Another horse was led forward and the pair rode away through the glimmering heat.
It was a silent ride for Willis Enderby and Io. The girl was still a little daunted at her own temerity in playing at fate with destinies as big as these. As for Enderby, there was no room within his consciousness for any other thought than that he was going to see Camilla Van Arsdale again.
He heard her before he saw her. The rhythms of a song, a tender and gay little lyric which she had sung to crowded drawing-rooms, but for him alone, long years past, floated out to him, clear and pure, through the clear, pure balm of the forest. He slipped quietly from his horse and saw her, through the window, seated at her piano.
Unchanged! To his vision the years had left no impress on her. And Io, at his side, saw too and marveled at the miracle. For the waiting woman looked out of eyes as clear and untroubled as those of a child, softened only with the questioning wistfulness of darkening vision. Suffering and fortitude had etherealized the face back to youth, and that mysterious expectancy which had possessed her for days had touched the curves of her mouth to a wonderful tenderness, the softness of her cheek to a quickening bloom. She turned her head slowly toward the door. Her lips parted with the pressure of swift, small breaths.
Io felt the man's tense body, pressed against her as if for support, convulsed with a tremor which left him powerless.
"I have brought some one to you, Miss Camilla," she said clearly: and in the same instant of speaking, her word was crossed by the other's call:
"Willis!"
Sightless though she was, as Io knew, for anything not close before her eyes, she came to him, as inevitably, as unerringly as steel to the magnet, and was folded in his arms. Io heard his deep voice, vibrant between desolation and passion:
"Fifteen years! My God, fifteen years!"
Io ran away into the forest, utterly glad with the joy of which she had been minister.
Willis Enderby stayed five days at Manzanita; five days of ecstasy, of perfect communion, bought from the rapacious years at the price of his broken word. For that he was willing to pay any price exacted, asking only that he might pay it alone, that the woman of his long and self-denying love might not be called upon to meet any smallest part of the debt. She walked with him under the pines: he read to her: and there were long hours together over the piano. It was then that there was born, out of Camilla Van Arsdale's love and faith and coming abnegation, her holy and deathless song for the dead, ............