“Well, wasn’t I rude!” he exclaimed, facetiously.  Then he grew serious.  “Mel, do you remember it was Helen’s lying that came between you and me—­as boy and girl friends?”

“I never knew.  Helen Wrapp!  What was it?”

“It’s not worth recalling and would hurt you—­now,” he replied.  “But it served to draw me Helen’s way.  We were engaged when she was seventeen....  Then came the war.  And the other night she laughed in my face because I was a wreck....  Mel, it’s beyond understanding how things work out.  Helen has chosen the fleshpots of Egypt.  You have chosen a lonelier and higher path....  And here I am in your little parlor asking you to marry me.”

“No, no, no!  Daren, don’t, I beg of you—­don’t talk to me this way,” she besought him.

“Mel, it’s a difference of opinion that makes arguments, wars and other things,” he said, with a cruelty in strange antithesis to the pity and tenderness he likewise felt.  He could hurt her.  He had power over her.  What a pang shot through his heart!  There would be an irresistible delight in playing on the emotions of this woman.  He could no more help it than the shame that surged over him at consciousness of his littleness.  He already loved her, she was all he had left to love, he would end in a day or a week or a month by worshipping her.  Through her he was going to suffer.  Peace would now never abide in his soul.

“Daren, you were never like this—­as a boy,” she said, in wondering distress.

“Like what?”

“You’re hard.  You used to be so—­so gentle and nice.”

“Hard!  I?  Yes, Mel, perhaps I am—­hard as war, hard as modern life, hard as my old friends, my little sister——­” he broke off.

“Daren, do not mock me,” she entreated.  “I should not have said hard.  But you’re strange to me—­a something terrible flashes from you.  Yet it’s only in glimpses....  Forgive me, Daren, I didn’t mean hard.”

Lane drew her down upon the couch so that she faced him, and he did not release her hand.

“Mel, I’m softer than a jelly-fish,” he said.  “I’ve no bone, no fiber, no stamina, no substance.  I’m more unstable than water.  I’m so soft I’m weak.  I can’t stand pain.  I lie awake in the dead hours of night and I cry like a baby, like a fool.  I weep for myself, for my mother, for Lorna, for you....”

“Hush!” She put a soft hand over his lips.

“Very well, I’ll not be bitter,” he went on, with mounting pulse, with thrill and rush of inexplicable feeling, as if at last had come the person who would not be deaf to his voice.  “Mel, I’m still the boy, your schoolmate, who used to pull the bow off your braid....  I am that boy still in heart, with all the war upon my head, with the years between then and now.  I’m young and old....  I’ve lived the whole gamut—­the fresh call of war to youth, glorious, but God! as false as stairs of sand—­the change of blood, hard, long, brutal, debasing labor