shing her trove.
When, an hour later, she dared leave her charge, she heard the rustle of
smoothed-out paper and remained outside long enough to allow for the
reading. On her return there was no sign of the letter. Miss Van
Arsdale, a faint and hopeful color in her cheeks, was asleep.

For Banneker these were days of trial and tribulation. Added to the
anxiety that he felt for his best friend was the uncertainty as to what
he ought to do about the developments affecting her guest. For he had
heard once more from Gardner.

"It's on the cards," wrote the reporter, "that I may be up to see you
again. I'm still working, on and off, on the tip that took me on that
wild-goose chase. If I come again I won't quit without some of the wild
goose's tail feathers, at least. There's a new tip locally; it leaked
out from Paradise. ["The Babbling Babson," interjected the reader
mentally.] It looks as though the bird were still out your way. Though
how she could be, and you not know it, gets me. It's even a bigger game
than Stella Wrightington, if my information is O.K. Have you heard or
seen anything lately of a Beautiful Stranger or anything like that
around Manzanita?... I enclose clipping of your story. What do you think
of yourself in print?"

Banneker thought quite highly of himself in print as he read the
article, which he immediately did. The other matter could wait; not that
it was less important; quite the contrary; but he proposed to mull it
over carefully and with a quiet mind, if he could ever get his mind back
to its peaceful current again: meantime it was good for him to think of
something quite dissociated from the main problem.

What writer has not felt the conscious red tingle in his cheeks at first
sight of himself in the magnified personification of type? Here is
something, once himself, now expanded far beyond individual limits, into
the proportions of publicity, for all the world to measure and estimate
and criticize. Ought it to have been done in just that way? Is there not
too much "I" in the presentation? Would not the effect have been greater
had the method been less personal? It seemed to Banneker that he himself
stood forth in a stark nakedness of soul and thought, through those
blatantly assertive words, shameless, challenging to public opinion, yet
delightful to his own appreciation. On the whole it was good; better
than he would have thought he could do.

What he had felt, in the writing of it, to be