most
desperate self-control that he could resist taking her in his arms,
confessing his love, swearing with lying lips he had forgotten the
wrong done her and asking her to face the future as his loving wife.
The thought was maddening. It needed no pity for Mel to strengthen it.
He needed love. He needed to fulfill his life.

But Lane did not yield, though he knew that if he continued to live
with Mel, in time the sweetness and enchantment of her would be too
great for him. This he confessed.

More and more he had to fight his jealousy and the treacherous
imagination that would create for him scenes of torment. He cursed
himself as base and ignoble. Yet the truth was always there. If Mel
had only loved the father of her child--if she had only loved blindly
and passionately as a woman--it would have been different. But her
sacrifice had not been one of love. It had been one of war. It had the
nobility of woman's sacrifice to the race. But as an individual she
had perished.

CHAPTER XXIII

Summer waned. The long hot days dragged by. The fading rushes along
the river drooped wearily over their dry beds. The yellowing leaves of
the trees hung dejected; they were mute petitioners for cool breezes
and rain. The grasshoppers chirped monotonously, the locusts screeched
shrilly, both being products of the long hot summer, and survivors of
the heat, inclined to voice their exultation far into the fall season.

September yielded them full sway, and burned away day by day, week by
week, dusty and scorching, without even a promise of rain. October,
however, dawned, misty and dark; the clouds crept up reluctantly at
first and then, as if to make amends for neglect, trooped black and
threatening toward the zenith. Storm followed storm, and at evening,
after the violent crashing thunder and vivid lightning and driving
torrents of rain had ceased, a soft, steady downpour persisted all
night and all the next day.

The drought was broken. A rainy fall season was prophesied. The old
danger of the river rising in flood was feared.

After the sear and lifeless color of the fields and forests, what a
welcome relief to Daren Lane were the freshened green, the dawning
red, the tinging gold! The forest on the hill was soft and warm, and
but for the gleams of autumn, would have showed some of the
tenderness of spring. Down in the lowlands a sea of color waved under
a blue, smoky, melancholy haze.

Lane climbed high that Sunday