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 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.