soul of her, that had stormed his heart and won it.  But he found to his consternation that however he revered her soul, it was the woman also who now allured him.  That moment of revelation to Lane was a catastrophe.  Was there no peace on earth for him?  What had he done to be so tortured?  He had a secret he must hide from Mel Iden.  He was human, he was alone, he needed love, but this seemed madness.  And at the moment of full realization Doctor Bronson’s strange words of possibility returned to haunt and flay him.  He might live!  A fierce thrill like a flame leaped from his heart, along his veins.  And a shudder, cold as ice, followed it.  Love would kill his resignation.  Love would add to his 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.