ove words on his lips had always died away before they were
spoken. He suffered in silence. When a man of forty loves for the first
time--it hurts.

Leon Ricaby was intended for the church. His personality as well as his
training made that his natural vocation. His pale, ascetic-looking face,
with its spiritual, thoughtful expression gave him an appearance quite
clerical, while his rich and resonant voice, and grave, deliberate
enunciation constantly suggested pulpit eloquence. Even as a boy he was
serious and studious, and as he approached manhood his mind became
filled with noble ideas regarding the uplifting of mankind. He became an
idealist, and, not content with mere words, carried his theories into
the New York slums, doing more than his share in the work of rescuing
the degraded and unfortunate. He felt within a call to the ministry,
and, on taking holy orders, had entered upon his duties with all the
impassioned fervor of a zealot. To established dogmas he paid little
heed. Christ was his Church. He tried to model his own life after that
of the humble Nazarene. But he soon realized the impossibility of
leading a consistent Christ-like life amid twentieth-century conditions.
He found no trace of Christ anywhere. Within the Church itself there was
not only an unholy traffic in preferments, but he found his fellow
clergy, curates, rectors, bishops at war among themselves, self-seeking,
greedy for power and money. The men and women in his congregations were
envious, selfish, malicious, hypocritical. It made him sick at heart,
and when he found that he could no longer reconcile the inconsistencies
of spiritual truths to his intellectual point of view, he left the
Church and took up the study of law. Admitted to the Bar, he began to
practice in New York, but only with indifferent success. In this career,
also, his conscience proved a stumbling block. He soon discovered that
men employed him not to teach them how to obey the law, but how to evade
it. Again he rebelled. He refused cases that did violence to his
principles no matter how profitable they might be. He declined to defend
law breakers whom he knew to be guilty. Those persons of whose innocence
he was assured, he would defend with all the energy and skill at his
command, giving his services gratuitously to those who could not afford
to pay, and in the court-room his outbursts of eloquence seldom failed
to convince the jury. Thus for years he plodded on accordin