thought; but all his soul was singing,
and reason, in a triumphant paean, assured him he was right. Something
of this change in him must have reached her, for she paused from her
reading, looked up at him, and smiled. His eyes dropped from her blue
eyes to her lips, and the sight of the stain maddened him. His arms all
but flashed out to her and around her, in the way of his old careless
life. She seemed to lean toward him, to wait, and all his will fought to
hold him back.

"You were not following a word," she pouted.

Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, and as he looked
into her frank eyes and knew that she had divined nothing of what he
felt, he became abashed. He had indeed in thought dared too far. Of all
the women he had known there was no woman who would not have guessed--save
her. And she had not guessed. There was the difference. She was
different. He was appalled by his own grossness, awed by her clear
innocence, and he gazed again at her across the gulf. The bridge had
broken down.

But still the incident had brought him nearer. The memory of it
persisted, and in the moments when he was most cast down, he dwelt upon
it eagerly. The gulf was never again so wide. He had accomplished a
distance vastly greater than a bachelorship of arts, or a dozen
bachelorships. She was pure, it was true, as he had never dreamed of
purity; but cherries stained her lips. She was subject to the laws of
the universe just as inexorably as he was. She had to eat to live, and
when she got her feet wet, she caught cold. But that was not the point.
If she could feel hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, then could she
feel love--and love for a man. Well, he was a man. And why could he not
be the man? "It's up to me to make good," he would murmur fervently. "I
will be _the_ man. I will make myself _the_ man. I will make good."

CHAPTER XII

Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry the
beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his brain,
Martin was called to the telephone.

"It's a lady's voice, a fine lady's," Mr. Higginbotham, who had called
him, jeered.

Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, and felt a wave
of warmth rush through him as he heard Ruth's voice. In his battle with
the sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the sound of her voice
his love for her smote him like a sudden blow. And such a
voice!--de