"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.