passed
forever.

He saw her now as his wife, a girl still, one who had been cruelly
wronged by life, who had turned her back upon the past and who lived
for him alone. She had beauty and brains, a wonderful voice, and
personality that might have fitted her for any career or station in
life. She thought only of him. She had found content in ministering to
him. She was noble and good.

In the light of these truths coming to him, Lane took stock of his
love for Mel. It had come to be too mighty a thing to understand in a
moment. He lived with it in the darkness of midnight and in the
loneliness of the hills. He had never loved Helen. Always he had loved
Mel Iden--all his life. Clear as a crystal he saw the truth. The war
with its ruin for both of them had only augmented the powers to love.
Lane's year of agony in Middleville had been the mere cradling of a
mounting and passionate love. He must face it now, no longer in dreamy
lulled unconsciousness, but in all its insidious and complex meaning.
The spiritual side of it had not changed. This girl with the bloom of
woman's loveliness upon her, with her grace and sweetness and fire,
with the love that comes only once in life, belonged to him, was his
wife. She did not try to hide anything. She was unconscious of appeal.
Her wistfulness came from her lonely soul.

The longer Lane dwelt on this matter of his love for Mel the deeper he
found it, the more inexplicable and alluring. And when at last it
stood out appallingly, master of him, so beautiful and strange and
bitter, he realized that between him and Mel was an insurmountable and
indestructible barrier.

Then came storm and strife of soul. Night and day the conflict went
on. Outwardly he did not show much sign of his trouble, though he
often caught Mel's dark eyes upon him, sadly conjecturing. He worked
in the garden; he fished the creek, and rowed miles on the river; he
wandered in the woods. And the only change that seemed to rise out of
his tumult was increasing love for this girl with whom his fate had
been linked.

So once more Lane became a sufferer, burdened by pangs, a wanderer
along the naked and lonely shore of grief. His passion and his ideal
were at odds. Unless he changed his nature, his reverence for
womanhood, he could never realize the happiness that might become his.
All that he had sacrificed had indeed been in vain. But he had been
true to himself. His pity for Mel was supreme. It was only by the