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.
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.