Mel Iden had been in her home four days when Lane first saw her there.

It was a day late in June when the rich, thick, amber light of afternoon seemed to float in the air.  Warm summer lay on the land.  The bees were humming in the rose vines over the porch.  Mrs. Iden, who evidently heard Lane’s step, appeared in the path, and nodding her gladness at sight of him, she pointed to the open door.

Lane halted on the threshold.  The golden light of the day seemed to have entered the room and found Mel.  It warmed the pallor of her skin and the whiteness of her dress.  When he had seen her before she had worn something plain and dark.  Could a white gown and the golden glow of June effect such transformation?  She came slowly toward him and took his hand.

“Daren, I am home,” was all she could say.

Long hours before Lane had braced himself for this ordeal.  It was himself he had feared, not Mel.  He played the part he had created for her imagination.  Behind his composure, his grave, kind earnestness, hid the subdued and scorned and unwelcome love that had come to him.  He held it down, surrounded, encompassed, clamped, so that he dared look into her eyes, listen to her voice, watch the sweet and tragic tremulousness of her lips.

“Yes, Mel, where you should be,” replied Lane.

“It was you—­your offer to marry me—­that melted father’s heart.”

“Mel, all he needed was to be made think,” returned Lane.  “And that was how I made him do it.”

“Oh, Daren, I thank you, for mother’s sake, for mine—­I can’t tell you how much.”

“Mel, please don’t thank me,” he answered.  “You understand, and that’s enough.  Now say you’ll marry me, Mel.”

Mel did not answer, but in the look of her eyes, dark, humid, with mysterious depths below the veil, Lane saw the truth; he felt it in the clasp of her hands, he divined it in all that so subtly emanated from the womanliness of her.  Mel had come to love him.

And all that he had endured seemed to rise and envelop heart and soul in a strange, cold stillness.

“Mel, will you marry me?” he repeated, almost dully.

Slowly Mel withdrew her hands.  The query seemed to make her mistress of herself.

“No, Daren, I cannot,” she replied, and turned away to look out of a window with unseeing eyes.  “Let us talk of other things....  My father says he will move away—­taking me and—­and—­all of us—­as soon as he sells the home.”

“No, Mel, if you’ll forgive me, we’ll not talk of something else,” Lane informed her.  “We can argue without quarreling.  Come over here and sit down.”

She came slowly, as if impelled, and she stood before him.  To Lane it seemed as if she were both supplicating and inexorable.

“Do you remember the last time we sat together on this couch?” she asked.

“No, Mel, I don’t.”

“It was four years ago—­and more.  I was sixteen.  You tried to kiss me and were angry because I wouldn’t let you.”