“I have loved you strongly, Routledge. You have been to me--the representative man. I have never known the touch of a woman’s hand, nor the eye of a woman--but for you I have felt all the great love of a man for a man. To-night, before you came, Sekar told me that only once again in this life I am to see you. It is to be after my trial in the Leper Valley. After that, I am to put away all love for you in the flesh, since it binds me to the Wheel.... This is harder for me than many Mindays, harder than service through interminable famines, harder than blows and revilings from multitudes of men, harder than any trial in the Leper Valley. To think that you must descend again into battle--you who know so well the awful sin of war--that I should have a fore-knowledge of you being maimed in the body, and to be unable to go to you--ah, nothing that I must face in the Leper Valley can haunt and torture the soul of your friend like this.” The half had never been told before. Routledge bowed before the great devotion of this simplest and holiest man the world had shown him. In a swift gesture Rawder’s hand had passed between the eyes of the correspondent and the candle-flame. Fragile, trembling, almost transparent, it was eloquent with a beauty Routledge had never noted before. Within himself great changes were enacting. There was _power_ in that little Rydamphur hut, power from the hidden wells of creation. It was made clear to him what force had impelled Sekar to find his _chela_. There was karma still for the ancient Hindu to work out, since he dragged his weary, grave-hungering flesh down from the peace and purity of his mountains to the burning plains of men--to take back this whitest soul of the Occident. “Rawder,” Routledge said slowly, reverently, “It has long been a big part of my understanding--what you mean to me. I once told a lady of you--of my bravest man--and this lady watches and listens for you across the world. That I go back into battle again is quite right and inevitable. I have not yet reached Mother Earth’s graduating class. The wound which you foretell is nothing. It is good that I am to see you once more--even in the Leper Valley--though it holds you longer than I thought from the rest you have earned. As for parting, you know better than I that the word has no meaning. You know better than I that the relations between master and disciple do not end with the body, nor the relations of friend and friend. There never has lived a pure great soul, who has not glimpsed what means the emancipation from the flesh, and discerned in his high moments such joys that the strength of his soul was sternly tried in the effort to live out his allotted days. If such glimpses were given to all men, the nations would suffer from a shock of suicide such as no war nor famine ever wrought.