No, she could not be ill.  He heard her spoken of, here and there, in his calls and ministrations to the sick and dying.  Evidently she was going about her work as usual.  Perhaps she was avoiding him.  Or perhaps she did not care, after all, and had lost her respect for him when he discovered to her his weakness.  And he had put himself on a plane so high above her.

There was no conscious wavering in his purpose.  But from much dwelling upon the thought, from much effort rather to put it away, his desire only to see her grew stronger day by day.  He had no fear.  He longed to test himself.  He was sure that he would be impassive, and be all the stronger for the test.  He was more devoted than ever in his Work.  He was more severe with himself, more charitable to others, and he could not doubt that he was gaining a hold-yes, a real hold-upon the lives of many about him.  The attendance was better at the chapel; more of the penitent and forlorn came to him for help.  And how alone he was!  My God, never even to see her!

In fact, Ruth Leigh was avoiding him.  It was partly from a womanly reserve—­called into expression in this form for the first time—­and partly from a wish to spare him pain.  She had been under no illusion from the first about the hopelessness of the attachment.  She comprehended his character so thoroughly that she knew that for him any fall from his ideal would mean his ruin.  He was one of the rare spirits of faith astray in a skeptical age.  For a time she had studied curiously his efforts to adapt himself to his surroundings.  One of these was joining a Knights of Labor lodge.  Another was his approach to the ethical-culture movement of some of the leaders in the Neighborhood Guild.  Another was his interest in the philanthropic work of agnostics like herself.  She could see that he, burning with zeal to save the souls of men, and believing that there was no hope for the world except in the renunciation of the world, instinctively shrank from these contacts, which, nevertheless, he sought in the spirit of a Jesuit missionary to a barbarous tribe.

It was possible for such a man to be for a time overmastered by human passion; it was possible even that he might reason himself temporarily into conduct that this natural passion seemed to justify; yet she never doubted that there would follow an awakening from that state of mind as from a horrible delusion.  It was simply because Ruth Leigh was guided by the exercise of reason, and had built up her scheme of life upon facts that she believed she could demonstrate, that she saw so clearly their relations, and felt that the faith, which was to her only a vagary of the material brain, was to him an integral part of his life.