ill learn to look within for the woman. You would not find favor
in finding her without. It is not for you--the red desire of love_."

How he had rebelled against the authority of those sentences, but his
respect for the deep vision of Gobind was complete. Moreover, the old
_Sannyasin_ had said he was not to return to India until he was ready
to give up the body. No sense of the physical end had come to him, even
in his darkest hour. There was much for him to do, and in New York, but
the pith was gone from him. His desolation made the idea of returning
to New York one of the hardest things he had ever faced. He had thought
of Beth Truba in his every conception of service. She inspired a love
which held him true to every ideal of woman, and kept the ideals
flaming higher. And what form she had brought to his concepts! In
expressing himself to her, direct world-values had attached to his
thoughts. Through her he had seen the ways of work. Every hour, he
blessed her in his heart--again and again; and every hour, the anguish
deepened.

But work had a different look. Darkness covered his dreams of service.
He was torn down; some great vitality was disintegrating. His projects
would be carried out; he would continue to give, and continue to
produce the things to give--but the heart, the love of giving, the
spirit of outpouring to men--these were gone from him. There was a
certain emptiness in following the old laws of his fuller nature. To
give and serve now, was like obeying the commands of the dead. He had
never turned to the past before. He would have been the first to tell
another--that one who looks to his past for the sanction of some act of
the present, has reached the end of growth.

Bedient could not lie to himself. He wanted to run away. He wanted to
sit at the knees of some old Gobind. Never since the night his mother
had taken him in her arms, had he so needed _to lean_.... Yes. he had
failed to find favor--in finding the woman.

And now came to him the inevitable thought, and not without savagery to
one of his nature: Was his high theme of uplift for women stimulated
from the beginning by his need of a human mate? Was it a mere
man-passion, which had charmed all his thoughts of women, from a boy?
Was this the glow which had illuminated his work in the world, during
the maturing silences of the Punjab? Was it physical, and not
spiritual--this love of all women, until he had come into his love of
one? And must