despair. Mel Iden could never love him. He did
not want her love. And yet, to live on and on, with such love as would
swell and mount from his agony, with the barrier between them growing
more terrible every day, was more than he cared to face. He would
rather die.

And so, at length, Lane's black demon of despair overthrew even his
thoughts of Mel, and fettered him there, in darkness and strife of
soul. He was an atom under the grinding, monstrous wheels of his
morbid mood.

Sometime, after endless moments or hours of lying there, with crushed
breast, with locked thoughts hideous and forlorn, with slow burn of
pang and beat of heart, Lane heard a heavy thump on the porch outside,
on the hall inside, on the stairs. Thump--thump, slow and heavy! It
roused him. It drove away the drowsy, thick and thunderous atmosphere
of mind. It had a familiar sound. Blair's crutch!

Presently there was a knock on the door of his room and Blair entered.
Blair, as always, bright of eye, smiling of lip, erect, proud,
self-sufficient, inscrutable and sure. Lane's black demon stole away.
Lane saw that Blair was whiter, thinner, frailer, a little farther on
that road from which there could be no turning.

"Hello, old scout," greeted Blair, as he sat down on the bed beside
Lane. "I need you more than any one--but it kills me to see you."

"Same here, Blair," replied Lane, comprehendingly.

"Gosh! we oughtn't be so finicky about each other's looks," exclaimed
Blair, with a smile.

But neither Lane nor Blair made further reference to the subject.

Each from the other assimilated some force, from voice and look and
presence, something wanting in their contact with others. These two
had measured all emotions, spanned in little time the extremes of
life, plumbed the depths, and now saw each other on the heights. In
the presence of Blair, Lane felt an exaltation. The more Blair seemed
to fade away from life, the more luminous and beautiful the light of
his countenance. For Lane the crippled and dying Blair was a deed of
valor done, a wrong expiated for the sake of others, a magnificent
nobility in contrast to the baseness and greed and cowardice of the
self-preservation that had doomed him. Lane had only to look at Blair
to feel something elevating in himself, to know beyond all doubt that
the goodness, the truth, the progress of man in nature, and of God in
his soul, must grow on forever.

Mel Iden had been in her home four days when La