Sometimes he would stop to get out and make one of his scouting detours, or he would follow a car to some distant roadhouse, or go to the outlying summer pavilions where popular dances were given.  More than once, late at night, he was an unseen and unbidden guest at one of the gay bathing parties.  Strange and startling incidents seemed to gravitate toward Lane.  He might have been predestined for this accumulation of facts.  How vain it seethed for wild young men and women to think they hid their tracks!  Some trails could not be hidden.

Toward the end of that protracted period of surveillance, Lane knew that he had become infamous in the eyes of most of that younger set.  He had been seen too often, alone, watching, with no apparent excuse for his presence.  And from here and there, through Bessy and Colonel Pepper, and Blair, who faithfully hunted him up, Lane learned of the unfavorable light in which he was held.  Society, in the persons of the younger matrons, took exception to Lane’s queer conduct and hinted of mental unbalance.  The young rakes and libertines avoided him, and there was not a slacker among them who could meet his eye across cafe or billiard room.

Yet despite the peculiar species of ignominy and disgrace that Middleville gossips heaped upon Lane’s head and the slow, steady decline of his speaking acquaintance with the elite, there were some who always greeted him and spoke if he gave them a chance.  Helen Wrapp never failed of a green flashing glance of mockery and enticement.  She smiled, she beckoned, she once called him to her car and asked him to ride with her, to come to see her.  Margaret Maynard rose above dread of her mother and greeted Lane graciously when occasion offered.  Dorothy Dalrymple and Elinor always evinced such unhesitating intention of friendship that Lane grew to avoid meeting them.  And twice, when he had come face to face with Mel Iden, her look, her smile had been such that he had plunged away somewhere, throbbing and thrilling, to grow blind and sick and numb.  It was the failure of his hopes, and the suffering he endured, and the vain longings she inspired that heightened his love.  She wrote him after the last time they had passed on the street—­a note that stormed Lane’s heart.  He did not answer.  He divined that his increasing loneliness, and the sure slow decline of his health, and the heartless intolerance of the same class that had ostracized her were added burdens to Mel Iden’s faithful heart.  He had seen it in her face, read it in her note.  And the time would come, sooner or later, when he could go to her and make her marry him.

CHAPTER XV.

To be a mystery is overpoweringly sweet to any girl and Bessy Bell was being that.  Her sudden desire for solitude had worried her mother, and her distant superiority had incited the vexation of her friends.  When they exerted themselves to win Bessy back to her old self she looked dreamily beyond them and became more aloof.  Doctor Bronson, in reply to Mrs. Bell’s appeal to him, looked the young woman over, asked her a few questions, marveled at the imperious artifice with which she evaded him, and throwing up his hands said Bessy was beyond him.