"I—did—this."

As she recalled this moment now, leaning upon her elbows, looking down upon the trees and grass and asphalt of the square, and upon a receding landau, a wave of a certain natural pride in her strength, the satisfaction of attainment, came to her. Ah! she was better than other women; ah! she was stronger than other women; she was carrying out a splendid work. She straightened herself to her full height abruptly, stretching her outspread hands vaguely to the sunlight, to the City, to the world, to the great engine of life whose lever she could grasp and could control, smiling proudly, almost insolently, in the consciousness of her strength, the fine steadfastness of her purpose. Then all at once the smile was struck from her lips, the stiffness of her poise suddenly relaxed. There, there it was again, the terror, the dreadful fear she dared not name, back in its place once more—at her side, at her shoulder, at her throat, ready to clutch at her from out the dark.

She wheeled from the window, from the sunlight, her hands clasped before her trembling lips, the tears brimming her dull-blue eyes. For forty-eight hours she had fought this from her. But now it was no longer to be resisted.

"No, no," she cried half aloud. "I am no better, no stronger than the others. What does it all amount to when I know that, after all, I am just a woman—just a woman whose heart is slowly breaking?"

But there was an interruption. Rownie had knocked twice at her door before Lloyd had heard her. When Lloyd had opened the door the girl handed her a card with an address written on it in the superintendent's hand.

"This here jus' now come in f'om Dr. Street, Miss Lloyd," said Rownie; "Miss Bergyn" (this was the superintendent nurse) "ast me to give it to you."

It was a call to an address that seemed familiar to Lloyd at first; but she did not stop at that moment to reflect. Her stable telephone hung against the wall of the closet. She rang for Lewis, and while waiting for him to get around dressed for the street.

For the moment, at the prospect of action, even her haunting fear drew off and stood away from her. She was absorbed in her work upon the instant—alert, watchful, self-reliant. What the case was she could only surmise. How long she would be away she had no means of knowing—a week, a month, a year, she could not tell. But she was ready for any contingency. Usually the doctors informed the nurses as to the nature of the case at the time of sending for them, but Dr. Street had not done so now.

However, Rownie called up to her that her coupe was at the door. Lloyd caught up her satchels and ran down the stairs, crying good-bye to Miss Douglass, whom she saw at the farther end of the hall. In the hallway by the vestibule she changed the slide bearing her name from the top to the bottom of the roster.

"How about your mail?" cried Miss Douglass after her.

"Keep it here for me until I see how long I'm to be away," answered Lloyd, her hand upon the knob. "I'll let you know."

Lewis had put Rox in the shafts, and while the coupe spun over the asphalt at a smart clip Lloyd tried to remember where she had heard of the address before. Suddenly she snapped her fingers; she knew the case, had even been assigned to it some eight months before.

"Yes, yes, that's it—Campbell—wife dead—Lafayette Avenue—little daughter, Hattie—hip disease—hopeless—poor little baby."

Arriving at the house, Lloyd found the surgeon, Dr. Street, and Mr. Campbell, who was a widower, waiting for her in a small drawing-room off the library. The surgeon was genuinely surprised and delighted to see her. Most of the doctors of the City knew Lloyd for the best trained nurse in the hospitals.

"Oh, it's you, Miss Searight; good enough!" The surgeon introduced her to the little patient's father, adding: "If any one can pull us through, Campbell, it will be Miss Searight."

The surgeon and nurse began to discuss the case.

"I think you know it already, don't you, Miss Searight?" said the surgeon. "You took care of it a while last winter. Well, there was a little improvement in the spring, not so much pain, but that in itself is a bad sign. We have done what we could, Farnham and I. But it don't yield to treatment; you know how these things are—stubborn. We made a preliminary examination yesterday. Sinuses have occurred, and the probe leads down to nothing but dead bone. Farnham and I had a consultation this morning. We must play our last card. I shall exsect the joint to-morrow."

Mr. Campbell drew in his breath and held it for a moment, looking out of the window.

Very attentive, Lloyd merely nodded her head, murmuring:

"I understand."

When Dr. Street had gone Lloyd immediately set to work. The operation was to take place at noon the following day, and she foresaw there would be no sleep for her that night. Street had left everything to her, even to the sterilising of his instruments. Until daylight the following morning Lloyd came and went about the house with an untiring energy, yet with the silence of a swiftly moving shadow, getting together the things needed for the operation—strychnia tablets, absorbent cotton, the rubber tubing for the tourniquet, bandages, salt, and the like—and preparing the little chamber adjoining the sick-room as an operating-room.

The little patient herself, Hattie, hardly into her teens, remembered Lloyd at once. Before she went to sleep Lloyd contrived to spend an hour in the sick-room with her, told her as much as was necessary of what was contemplated, and, by her cheery talk, her gentleness and sympathy, inspired the little girl with a certain sense of confidence and trust in her.

"But—but—but just how bad will it hurt, Miss Searight?" inquired Hattie, looking at her, wide-eyed and serious.

"Dear, it won't hurt you at all; just two or three breaths of the ether and you will be sound asleep. When you wake up it will be all over and you will be well."

Lloyd made the ether cone from a stiff towel, and set it on Hattie's dressing-table. Last of all and just before the operation the gauze sponges occupied her attention. The daytime brought her no rest. Hattie was not to have any breakfast, but toward the middle of the forenoon Lloyd gave her a stimulating enema of whiskey and water, following it about an hour later by a hundredth grain of atropia. She braided the little girl's hair in two long plaits so that her head would rest squarely and flatly upon the pillow. Hattie herself was now ready for the surgeon.

Now there was nothing more to be done. Lloyd could but wait. She took her place at the bedside and tried to talk as lightly as was possible to her patient. But now there was a pause in the round of action. Her mind no longer keenly intent upon the immediate necessities of the moment, began to hark back again to the one great haunting fear that for so long had overshadowed it. Even while she exerted herself to be cheerful and watched for the smiles on Hattie's face her hands twisted tight and tighter under the folds of her blouse, and some second self within her seemed to say:

"Suppose, suppose it should come, this thing I dread but dare not name, what then, what then? Should I not expect it? Is it not almost a certainty? Have I not been merely deceiving myself with the forlornest hopes? Is it not the most reasonable course to expect the worst? Do not all indications point that way? Has not my whole life been shaped to this end? Was not this calamity, this mighty sorrow, prepared for me even before I was born? And one can do nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing, but wait and hope and fear, and eat out one's heart with longing."

There was a knock at the door. Instead of calling to enter Lloyd went to it softly and opened it a few inches. Mr. Campbell was there.

"They've come—Street and the assistant."

Lloyd heard a murmur of voices in the hall below and the closing of the front door.

Farnham and Street went at once to the operating-room to make their hands and wrists aseptic. Campbell had gone downstairs to his smoking-room. It had been decided—though contrary to custom—that Lloyd should administer the chloroform.

At length Street tapped with the handle of a scalpel on the door to say that he was ready.

"Now, dear," said Lloyd, turning to Hattie, and picking up the ether cone.

But the little girl's courage suddenly failed her. She began to plead in a low voice choked with tears. Her supplications were pitiful; but Lloyd, once more intent upon her work, every faculty and thought concentrated upon what must be done, did not temporise an instant. Quietly she gathered Hattie's frail wrists in the grip of one strong palm, and held the cone to her face until she had passed off with a long sigh. She picked her up lightly, carried her into the next room, and laid her upon the operating-table. At the last moment Lloyd had busied herself with the preparation of her own person. Over her dress she passed her hospital blouse, which had been under a dry heat for hours. She rolled her sleeves up from her strong white forearms with their thick wrists and fine blue veining, and for upward of ten minutes scrubbed them with a new nail-brush in water as hot as she could bear it. After this she let her hands and forearms lie in the permanganate of potash solution till they were brown to the elbow, then washed away the stain in the oxalic-acid solution and in sterilised hot water. Street and Farnham, wearing their sterilised gowns and gloves, took their places. There was no conversation. The only sounds were an occasional sigh from the patient, a direction given in a low tone, and, at intervals, the click of the knives and scalpel. From outside the window came the persistent chirping of a band of sparrows.

Promptly the operation was begun; there was no delay, no hesitation; what there was to be done had been carefully planned beforehand, even to the minutest details. Street, a master of his profession, thoroughly familiar with every difficulty that might present itself during the course of the work in hand, foreseeing every contingency, prepared for every emergency, calm, watchful, self-contained, set about the exsecting of the joint with no trace of compunction, no embarrassment, no misgiving. His assistants, as well as he himself, knew that life or death hung upon the issue of the next ten minutes. Upon Street alone devolved the life of the little girl. A second's hesitation at the wrong stage of the operation, a slip of bistoury or scalpel, a tremor of the wrist, a single instant's clumsiness of the fingers, and the Enemy—watching for every chance, intent for every momentarily opened chink or cranny wherein he could thrust his lean fingers—entered the frail tenement with a leap, a rushing, headlong spring that jarred the house of life to its foundations. Lowering close over her head Lloyd felt the shadow of his approach. He had arrived there in that commonplace little room, with its commonplace accessories, its ornaments, that suddenly seemed so trivial, so impertinent—the stopped French clock, with its simpering, gilded cupids, on the mantelpiece; the photograph of a number of picnickers "grouped" on a hotel piazza gazing with monolithic cheerfulness at this grim business, this struggle of the two world forces, this crisis in a life.

Then abruptly the operation was over.

The nurse and surgeons eased their positions immediately, drawing long breaths. They began to talk, commenting upon the operation, and Lloyd, intensely interested, asked Street why he had, contrary to her expectations, removed the bone above the lesser trochanter. He smiled, delighted at her intelligence.

"It's better than cutting through the neck, Miss Searight," he told her. "If I had gone through the neck, don't you see, the trochanter major would come over the hole and prevent the discharges."

"Yes, yes, I see, of course," assented Lloyd.

The incision was sewn up, and when all was over Lloyd carried Hattie back to the bed in the next room. Slowly the little girl regained consciousness, and Lloyd began to regard her once more as a human being. During the operation she had forgotten the very existence of Hattie Campbell, a little girl she knew. She had only seen a bit of mechanism out of order and in the hands of a repairer. It was always so with Lloyd. Her charges were not infrequently persons whom she knew, often intimately, but during the time of their sickness their personalities vanished for the trained nurse; she saw only the "case," only the mechanism, only the deranged clockwork in imminent danger of running down.

But the danger was by no means over. The operation had been near the trunk. There had been considerable loss of blood, and the child's power of resistance had been weakened by long periods of suffering. Lloyd feared that the shock might prove too great. Farnham departed, but for a little while the surgeon remained with Lloyd to watch the symptoms. At length, however, he too, pressed for time, and expected at one of the larger hospitals of the City, went away, leaving directions for Lloyd to telephone him in case of the slightest change. At this hour, late in the afternoon, there were no indications that the little girl would not recover from the shock. Street believed she would rally and ultimately regain her health.

"But," he told Lloyd as he bade her good-bye, "I don't need to impress upon you the need of care and the greatest vigilance; absolute rest is the only thing; she must see nobody, not even her father. The whole system is numbed and deadened just yet, but there will be a change either for better or worse some time to-night."

For thirty-six hours Lloyd had not closed an eye, but of that she had no thought. Her supper was sent up to her, and she prepared herself for her night's watch. She gave the child such nourishment as she believed she could stand, and from time to time took her pulse, making records of it upon her chart for the surgeon's inspection later on. At intervals she took Hattie's temperature, placing the clinical thermometer in the armpit. Toward nine in the evening, while she was doing this for the third time within the hour, one of the house servants came to the room to inform her that she was wanted on the telephone. Lloyd hesitated, unwilling to leave Hattie for an instant. However, the telephone was close at hand, and it was quite possible that Dr. Street had rung her up to ask for news.

But it was the agency that had called, and Miss Douglass informed her that a telegram had arrived there for her a few moments before. Should she hold it or send it to her by Rownie? Lloyd reflected a moment.

"Oh—open it and read it to me," she said. "It's a call, isn't it?—or—no; send it here by Rownie, and send my hospital slippers with her, the ones without heels. But don't ring up again to-night; we're expecting a crisis almost any moment."

Lloyd returned to the sick-room, sent away the servant, and once more settled herself for the night. Hattie had roused for a moment.

"Am I going to get well, am I going to get well, Miss Searight?"

Lloyd put her finger to her lips, nodding her head, and Hattie closed her eyes again with a long breath. A certain great tenderness and compassion for the little girl grew big in Lloyd's heart. To herself she said:

"God helping me, you shall get well. They believe in me, these people—'If any one could pull us through it would be Miss Searight.' We will 'pull through,' yes, for I'll do it."

The night closed down, dark and still and very hot. Lloyd, regulating the sick-room's ventilation, opened one of the windows from the top. The noises of the City steadily decreasing as the hours passed, reached her ears in a subdued, droning murmur. On her bed, that had for so long been her bed of pain, Hattie lay with closed eyes, inert, motionless, hardly seeming to breathe, her life in the balance; unhappy little invalid, wasted with suffering, with drawn, pinched face and bloodless lips, and at her side Lloyd, her dull-blue eyes never leaving her patient's face, alert and vigilant, despite her long wakefulness, her great bronze-red flame of hair rolling from her forehead and temples, the sombre glow in her cheeks no whit diminished by her day of fatigue, of responsibility and untiring activity.

For the time being she could thrust her fear, the relentless Enemy that for so long had hung upon her heels, back and away from her. There was another Enemy now to fight—or was it another—was it not the same Enemy, the very same, whose shadow loomed across that sick-bed, across the frail, small body and pale, drawn face?

With her pity and compassion for the sick child there arose in Lloyd a certain unreasoned, intuitive obstinacy, a banding together of all her powers and faculties in one great effort at resistance, a steadfastness under great stress, a stubbornness, that shut its ears and eyes. It was her one dominant characteristic rising up, strong and insistent the instant she knew herself to be thwarted in her desires or checked in a course she believed to be right and good. And now as she felt the advance of the Enemy and saw the shadow growing darker across the bed her obstinacy hardened like tempered steel.

"No," she murmured, her brows levelled, her lips compressed, "she shall not die. I will not let her go."

A little later, perhaps an hour after midnight, at a time when she believed Hattie to be asleep, Lloyd, watchful as ever, noted that her cheeks began alternately to puff out and contract with her breathing. In an instant the nurse was on her feet. She knew the meaning of this sign. Hattie had fainted while asleep. Lloyd took the temperature. It was falling rapidly. The pulse was weak, rapid, and irregular. It seemed impossible for Hattie to take a deep breath.

Then swiftly the expected crisis began to develop itself. Lloyd ordered Street to be sent for, but only as a matter of form. Long before he could arrive the issue would be decided. She knew that now Hattie's life depended on herself alone.

"Now," she murmured, as though the Enemy she fought could hear her, "now let us see who is the stronger. You or I."

Swiftly and gently she drew the bed from the wall and raised its foot, propping it in position with half a dozen books. Then, while waiting for the servants, whom she had despatched for hot blankets, administered a hypodermic injection of brandy.

"We will pull you through," she kept saying to herself, "we will pull you through. I shall not let you go."

The Enemy was close now, and the fight was hand to hand. Lloyd could almost feel, physically, actually, feel the slow, sullen, resistless pull that little by little was dragging Hattie's life from her grip. She set her teeth, holding back with all her might, bracing herself against the strain, refusing with all inborn stubbornness to yield her position.

"No—no," she repeated to herself, "you shall not have her. I will not give her up; you shall not triumph over me."

Campbell was in the room, warned by the ominous coming and going of hushed footsteps.

"What is the use, nurse? It's all over. Let her die in peace. It's too cruel; let her die in peace."

The half-hour passed, then the hour. Once more Lloyd administered hypodermically the second dose of brandy. Campbell, unable to bear the sight, had withdrawn to the adjoining room, where he could be heard pacing the floor. From time to time he came back for a moment, whispering:

"Will she live, nurse? Will she live? Shall we pull her through?"

"I don't know," Lloyd told him. "I don't know. Wait. Go back. I will let you know."

Another fifteen minutes passed. Lloyd fancied that the heart's action was growing a little stronger. A great stillness had settled over the house. The two servants waiting Lloyd's orders in the hall outside the door refrained even from whispering. From the next room came the muffled sound of pacing footsteps, hurried, irregular, while with that strange perversity which seizes upon the senses at moments when they are more than usually acute Lloyd began to be aware of a vague, unwonted movement in the City itself, outside there behind the drawn curtains and half-opened window—a faint, uncertain agitation, a trouble, a passing ripple on the still black pool of the night, coming and going, and coming again, each time a little more insistent, each time claiming a little more attention and notice. It was about half past three o'clock. But the little patient's temperature was rising—there could be no doubt about that. The lungs expanded wider and deeper. Hattie's breathing was unmistakably easier; and as Lloyd put her fingers to the wrist she could hardly keep back a little exultant cry as she felt the pulse throbbing fuller, a little slower, a little more regularly. Now she redoubled her attention. Her hold upon the little life shut tighter; her power of resistance, her strength of purpose, seemed to be suddenly quadrupled. She could imagine the Enemy drawing off; she could think that the grip of cold fingers was loosening.

Slowly the crisis passed off, slowly the reaction began. Hattie was still unconscious, but there was a new look upon her face—a look that Lloyd had learned to know from long experience, an intangible and most illusive expression, nothing, something, the sign that only those who are trained to search for it may see and appreciate—the earliest faint flicker after the passing of the shadow.

"Will she live, will she live, nurse?" came Mr. Campbell's whisper at her shoulder.

"I think—I am almost sure—but we must not be too certain yet. Still there's a chance; yes, there's a chance."

Campbell, suddenly gone white, put out his hand and leaned a moment against the mantelpiece. He did not now leave the room. The door-bell rang.

"Dr. Street," murmured Lloyd.

But what had happened in the City? There in the still dark hours of that hot summer night an event of national, perhaps even international, importance had surely transpired. It was in the air—a sense of a Great Thing come suddenly to a head somewhere in the world. Footsteps sounded rapidly on the echoing sidewalks. Here and there a street door opened. From corner to corner, growing swiftly nearer, came the cry of newsboys chanting extras. A subdued excitement was abroad, finding expression in a vague murmur, the mingling of many sounds into one huge note—a note that gradually swelled and grew louder and seemed to be rising from all corners of the City at once.

There was a step at the sick-room door. Dr. Street? No, Rownie—Rownie with two telegrams for Lloyd.

Lloyd took them from her, then with a sharp, brusque movement of her head and suddenly smitten with an idea, turned from them to listen to the low, swelling murmur of the City. These despatches—no, they were no "call" for her. She guessed what they might be. Why had they come to her now? Why was there this sense of some great tidings in the wind? The same tidings that had come to the world might come to her—in these despatches. Might it not be so? She caught her breath quickly. The terror, the fearful anxiety that had haunted and oppressed her for so long, was it to be lifted now at last? The Enemy that lurked in the dark corners, ever ready to clutch her, was it to be driven back and away from her forever? She dared not hope for it. But something was coming to her; she knew it, she felt it; something was preparing for her, coming to her swifter with every second—coming, coming, coming from out the north. She saw Dr. Street in the room, though how and when he had arrived she could not afterward recall. Her mind was all alert, intent upon other things, listening, waiting. The surgeon had been leaning over the bed. Suddenly he straightened up, saying aloud to Campbell:

"Good, good, we're safe. We have pulled through."

Lloyd tore open her telegrams. One was signed "Bennett," the other "Ferriss."

"Thank God!" exclaimed Mr. Campbell.

"Oh," cried Lloyd, a great sob shaking her from head to heel, a smile of infinite happiness flashing from her face. "Oh—yes, thank God, we—we have pulled through."

"Am I going to get well, am I going to get well, Miss Searight?" Hattie, once more conscious, raised her voice weak and faint.

Lloyd was on her knees beside her, her head bent over her.

"Hush; yes, dear, you are safe." Then the royal bronze-red hair bent lower still. The dull-blue eyes were streaming now, the voice one low quiver of sobs. Tenderly, gently Lloyd put an arm about the child, her head bending lower and lower. Her cheek touched Hattie's. For a moment the little girl, frail, worn, pitifully wasted, and the strong, vigorous woman, with her imperious will and indomitable purpose, rested their heads upon the same pillow, both broken with suffering, the one of the body, the other of the mind.

"Safe; yes, dear, safe," whispered Lloyd, her face all but hidden. "Safe, safe, and saved to me. Oh, dearest of all the world!"

And then to her ears the murmur of the City seemed to leap suddenly to articulate words, the clanging thunder of the entire nation—the whole round world thrilling with this great news that had come to it from out the north in the small hours of this hot summer's night. And the chanting cries of the street rolled to her like the tremendous diapason of a gigantic organ:

"Rescued, rescued, rescued!"



IV.

On the day that Lloyd returned to the house on Calumet Square (Hattie's recovery being long since assured), and while she was unpacking her valise and settling herself again in her room, a messenger boy brought her a note.

"Have just arrived in the City. When may I see you? BENNETT."

News of Ward Bennett and of Richard Ferriss had not been wanting during the past fortnight or so. Their names and that of the ship herself, even the names of Adler, Hansen, Clarke, and Dennison, even Muck Tu, even that of Kamiska, the one surviving dog, filled the mouths and minds of men to the exclusion of everything else.

The return of the expedition after its long imprisonment in the ice and at a time when all hope of its safety had been abandoned was one of the great events of that year. The fact that the expedition had failed to reach the Pole, or to attain any unusual high latitude, was forgotten or ignored. Nothing was remembered but the masterly retreat toward Kolyuchin Bay, the wonderful march over the ice, the indomitable courage, unshaken by hardship, perils, obstacles, and privations almost beyond imagination. All this, together with a multitude of details, some of them palpably fictitious, the press of the City where Bennett and Ferriss both had their homes published and republished and published again and again. News of the men, their whereabouts and intentions, invaded the sick-room—where Lloyd watched over the convalescence of her little patient—by the very chinks of the windows.

Lloyd learned how the ship had been "nipped;" how, after inconceivable toil, the members of the expedition had gained the land; how they had marched southward toward the Chuckch settlements; how, at the eleventh hour, the survivors, exhausted and starving, had been rescued by the steam whalers; how these whalers themselves had been caught in the ice, and how the survivors of the Freja had been obliged to spend another winter in the Arctic. She learned the details of their final return. In the quiet, darkened room where Hattie lay she heard from without the echo of the thunder of the nations; she saw how the figure of Bennett towered suddenly magnificent in the world; how that the people were brusquely made aware of a new hero. She learned that honours came thronging about him unsought; that the King of the Belgians had conferred a decoration upon him; that the geographical societies of continental Europe had elected him to honourary membership; that the President and the Secretary of War had sent telegrams of congratulations.

"And what does he do," she murmured, "the first of all upon his return? Asks to see me—me!"

She sent an answer to his note by the same boy who brought it, naming the following afternoon, explaining that two days later she expected to go into the country to a little town called Bannister to take her annual fortnight's vacation.

"But what of—of the other?" she murmured as she stood at the window of her room watching the messenger boy bicycling across the square. "Why does not he—he, too—?"

She put her chin in the air and turned about, looking abstractedly at the rugs on the parquetry.

Lloyd's vacation had really begun two days before. Her name was off the roster of the house, and till the end of the month her time was her own. The afternoon was hot and very still. Even in the cool, stone-built agency, with its windows wide and heavily shaded with awnings, the heat was oppressive. For a long time Lloyd had been shut away from fresh air and the sun, and now she suddenly decided to drive out in the City's park. She rang up her stable and ordered Lewis to put her ponies to her phaeton.

She spent a delightful two hours in the great park, losing herself in its farthest, shadiest, and most unfrequented corners. She drove herself, and intelligently. Horses were her passion, and not Lewis himself understood their care and management better. Toward the cool of the day and just as she had pulled the ponies down to a walk in a long, deserted avenue overspanned with elms and great cottonwoods she was all at once aware of an open carriage that had turned into the far end of the same avenue approaching at an easy trot. It drew near, and she saw that its only occupant was a man leaning back rather limply in the cushions. As the eye of the trained nurse fell upon him she at once placed him in the category of convalescents or chronic invalids, and she was vaguely speculating as to the nature of his complaint when the carriage drew opposite her phaeton, and she recognised Richard Ferriss.

Ferriss, but not the same Ferriss to whom she had said good-bye on that never-to-be-forgotten March afternoon, with its gusts and rain, four long years ago. The Ferriss she had known then had been an alert, keen man, with quick, bright eyes, alive to every impression, responsive to every sensation, living his full allowance of life. She was looking now at a man unnaturally old, of deadened nerves, listless. As he caught sight of her and recognised her he suddenly roused himself with a quick, glad smile and with a look in his eyes that to Lloyd was unmistakable. But there was not that joyful, exuberant start she had anticipated, and, for that matter, wished. Neither did Lloyd set any too great store by the small amenities of life, but that Ferriss should remain covered hurt her a little. She wondered how she could note so trivial a detail at such a moment. But this was Ferriss.

Her heart was beating fast and thick as she halted her ponies. The driver of the carriage jumped down and held the door for Ferriss, and the chief engineer stepped quickly toward her.

So it was they met after four years—and such years—unexpectedly, without warning or preparation, and not at all as she had expected. What they said to each other in those first few moments Lloyd could never afterward clearly remember. One incident alone detached itself vividly from the blur.

"I have just come from the square," Ferriss had explained, "and they told me that you had left for a drive out here only the moment before, so there was nothing for it but to come after you."

"Shan't we walk a little?" she remembered she had asked after a while. "We can have the carriages wait; or do you feel strong enough? I forgot—"

But he interrupted her, protesting his fitness.

"The doctor merely sent me out to get the air, and it's humiliating to be wheeled about like an old woman."

Lloyd passed the reins back of her to Lewis, and, gathering her skirts about her, started to descend from the phaeton. The step was rather high from the ground. Ferriss stood close by. Why did he not help her? Why did he stand there, his hands in his pockets, so listless and unconscious of her difficulty. A little glow of irritation deepened the dull crimson of her cheeks. Even returned Arctic explorers could not afford to ignore entirely life's little courtesies—and he of all men.

"Well," she said, expectantly hesitating before attempting to descend.

Then she caught Ferriss's eyes fixed upon her. He was smiling a little, but the dull, stupefied expression of his face seemed for a brief instant to give place to one of great sadness. He raised a shoulder resignedly, and Lloyd, with the suddenness of a blow, remembered that Ferriss had no hands.

She dropped back in the seat of the phaeton, covering her eyes, shaken and unnerved for the moment with a great thrill of infinite pity—of shame at her own awkwardness, and of horror as for one brief instant the smiling summer park, the afternoon's warmth, the avenue of green, over-arching trees, the trim, lacquered vehicles and glossy-brown horses were struck from her mind, and she had a swift vision of the Ice, the darkness of the winter night, the lacerating, merciless cold, the blinding, whirling, dust-like snow.

For half an hour they walked slowly about in the park, the carriages following at a distance. They did not talk very much. It seemed to Lloyd that she would never tire of scrutinising his face, that her interest in his point of view, his opinions, would never flag. He had had an experience that came but to few men. For four years he had been out of the world, had undergone privation beyond conception. What now was to be his attitude? How had he changed? That he had not changed to her Lloyd knew in an instant. He still loved her; that was beyond all doubt. But this terrible apathy that seemed now to be a part of him! She had heard of the numbing stupor that invades those who stay beyond their time in the Ice, but never before had she seen it in its reality. It was not a lack of intelligence; it seemed rather to be the machinery of intelligence rusted and clogged from long disuse. He deliberated long before he spoke. It took him some time to understand things. Speech did not come to him readily, and he became easily confused in the matter of words. Once, suddenly, he had interrupted her, breaking out with:

"Oh, the smell of the trees, of the grass! Isn't it wonderful; isn't it wonderful?" And a few seconds later, quite irrelevantly: "And, after all, we failed."

At once Lloyd was all aroused, defending him against himself.

"Failed! And you say that? If you did not reach the Pole, what then? The world will judge you by results perhaps, and the world's judgment will be wrong. Is it nothing that you have given the world an example of heroism—"

"Oh, don't call it that."

"Of heroism, of courage, of endurance? Is it nothing that you have overcome obstacles before which other men would have died? Is it nothing that you have shown us all how to be patient, how to be strong? There are some things better even than reaching the Pole. To suffer and be calm is one of them; not to give up—never to be beaten—is another. Oh, if I were a man! Ten thousand, a hundred thousand people are reading to-night of what you have done—of what you have done, you understand, not of what you have failed to do. They have seen—you have shown them what the man can do who says I will, and you have done a little more, have gone a little further, have been a little braver, a little hardier, a little nobler, a little more determined than any one has ever been before. Whoever fails now cannot excuse himself by saying that he has done as much as a man can do. He will have to remember the men of the Freja. He will have to remember you. Don't you suppose I am proud of you; don't you suppose that I am stronger and better because of what you have done? Do you think it is nothing for me to be sitting here beside you, here in this park—to be—yes, to be with you? Can't you understand? Isn't it something to me that you are the man you are; not the man whose name the people are shouting just now, not the man to whom a king gave a bit of ribbon and enamel, but the man who lived like a man, who would not die just because it was easier to die than to live, who fought like a man, not only for himself but for the lives of those he led, who showed us all how to be strong, and how strong one could be if one would only try? What does the Pole amount to? The world wants men, great, strong, harsh, brutal men—men with purposes, who let nothing, nothing, nothing stand in their way."

"You mean Bennett," said Ferriss, looking up quickly. "You commenced by speaking of me, but it's Bennett you are talking of now."

But he caught her glance and saw that she was looking steadfastly at him—at him. A look was in her face, a light in her dull-blue eyes, that he had never seen there before.

"Lloyd," he said quietly, "which one of us, Bennett or I, were you speaking of just then? You know what I mean; which one of us?"

"I was speaking of the man who was strong enough to do great things," she said.

Ferriss drew the stumps of his arms from his pockets and smiled at them grimly.

"H'm, can one do much—this way?" he muttered.

With a movement she did not try to restrain Lloyd put both her hands over his poor, shapeless wrists. Never in her life had she been so strongly moved. Pity, such as she had never known, a tenderness and compassion such as she had never experienced, went knocking at her breast. She had no words at hand for so great emotions. She longed to tell him what was in her heart, but all speech failed.

"Don't!" she exclaimed. "Don't! I will not have you."

A little later, as they were returning toward the carriages, Lloyd, after a moment's deliberation upon the matter, said:

"Can't I set you down somewhere near your rooms? Let your carriage go."

He shook his head: "I've just given up my downtown rooms. Bennett and I have taken other rooms much farther uptown. In fact, I believe I am supposed to be going there now. It would be quite out of your way to take me there. We are much quieter out there, and people can't get at us so readily. The doctor says we both need rest after our shaking up. Bennett himself—iron as he is—is none too strong, and what with the mail, the telegrams, reporters, deputations, editors, and visitors, and the like, we are kept on something of a strain. Besides we have still a good deal of work to do getting our notes into shape."

Lewis brought the ponies to the edge of the walk, and Lloyd and Ferriss separated, she turning the ponies' heads homeward, starting away at a brisk trot, and leaving him in his carriage, which he had directed to carry him to his new quarters.

But at the turn of the avenue Lloyd leaned from the phaeton and looked back. The carriage was just disappearing down the vista of elms and cottonwoods. She waved her hand gayly, and Ferriss responded with the stump of one forearm.

On the next day but one, a Friday, Lloyd was to go to the country. Every year in the heat of the summer Lloyd spent her short vacation in the sleepy and old-fashioned little village of Bannister. The country around the village was part of the Searight estate. It was quiet, off the railroad, just the place to forget duties, responsibilities, and the wearing anxieties of sick-rooms. But Thursday afternoon she expected Bennett.

Thursday morning she was in her room. Her trunk was already packed. There was nothing more to be done. She was off duty. There was neither care nor responsibility upon her mind. But she was too joyful, too happily exalted, too exuberant in gayety to pass her time in reading. She wanted action, movement, life, and instinctively threw open a window of her room, and, according to her habit, leaned upon her elbows and looked out and down upon the square. The morning was charming. Later in the day it probably would be very hot, but as yet the breeze of the earliest hours was stirring nimbly. The cool of it put a brisker note in the sombre glow of her cheeks, and just stirred a lock that, escaping from her gorgeous coils of dark-red hair, hung curling over her ear and neck. Into her eyes of dull blue—like the blue of old china—the morning's sun sent an occasional unwonted sparkle. Over the asphalt and over the green grass-plots of the square the shadows of the venerable elms wove a shifting maze of tracery. Traffic avoided the place. It was invariably quiet in the square, and one—as now—could always hear the subdued ripple and murmur of the fountain in the centre.

But the crowning delight of that morning was the sudden appearance of a robin in a tree close to Lloyd's window. He was searching his breakfast. At every moment he came and went between the tree-tops and the grass-plots, very important, very preoccupied, chittering and calling the while, as though he would never tire. Lloyd whistled to him, and instantly he answered, cocking his head sideways. She whistled again, and he piped back an impudent response, and for quite five minutes the two held an elaborate altercation between tree-top and window-ledge. Lloyd caught herself laughing outright and aloud for no assignable reason. "Ah, the world was a pretty good place after all!"

A little later, and while she was still at the window, Rownie brought her a note from Bennett, sent by special messenger.

"Ferriss woke up sick this morning. Nobody here but the two of us; can't leave him alone. BENNETT."

"Oh!" exclaimed Lloyd Searight a little blankly.

The robin and his effrontery at once ceased to be amusing. She closed the window abruptly, shutting out the summer morning's gayety and charm, turning her back upon the sunlight.

Now she was more in the humour of reading. On the great divan against the wall lay the month's magazines and two illustrated weeklies. Lloyd had bought them to read on the train. But now she settled herself upon the divan and, picking up one of the weeklies, turned its leaves listlessly. All at once she came upon two pictures admirably reproduced from photographs, and serving as illustrations to the weekly's main article—"The Two Leaders of the Freja Expedition." One was a picture of Bennett, the other of Ferriss.

The suddenness with which she had come upon his likeness almost took Lloyd's breath from her. It was the last thing she had expected. If he himself had abruptly entered the room in person she could hardly have been more surprised. Her heart gave a great leap, the dull crimson of her cheeks shot to her forehead. Then, with a charming movement, at once impulsive and shamefaced, smiling the while, her eyes half-closing, she laid her cheek upon the picture, murmuring to herself words that only herself should hear. The next day she left for the country.

On that same day when Dr. Pitts arrived at the rooms Ferriss and Bennett had taken he found the anteroom already crowded with visitors—a knot of interviewers, the manager of a lecture bureau, as well as the agent of a patented cereal (who sought the man of the hour for an endorsement of his article), and two female reporters.

Decidedly Richard Ferriss was ill; there could be no doubt about that. Bennett had not slept the night before, but had gone to and fro about the rooms tending to his wants with a solicitude and a gentleness that in a man so harsh and so toughly fibred seemed strangely out of place. Bennett was far from well himself. The terrible milling which he had undergone had told even upon that enormous frame, but his own ailments were promptly ignored now that Ferriss, the man of all men to him, was "down."

"I didn't pull through with you, old man," he responded to all of Ferriss's protests, "to have you get sick on my hands at this time of day. No more of your damned foolishness now. Here's the quinine. Down with it!"

Bennett met Pitts at the door of Ferriss's room, and before going in drew him into a corner.

"He's a sick boy, Pitts, and is going to be worse, though he's just enough of a fool boy not to admit it. I've seen them start off this gait before. Remember, too, when you look him over that it's not as though he had been in a healthy condition before. Our work in the ice ground him down about as fine as he could go and yet live, and the hardtack and salt pork on the steam whalers were not a good diet for a convalescent. And see here, Pitts," said Bennett, clearing his throat, "I—well, I'm rather fond of that fool boy in there. We are not taking any chances, you understand."

After the doctor had seen the chief engineer and had prescribed calomel and a milk diet, Bennett followed him out into the hall and accompanied him to the door.

"Verdict?" he demanded, fixing the physician intently with his small, distorted eyes. But Pitts was non-committal.

"Yes, he's a sick boy, but the thing, whatever it is going to be, has been gathering slowly. He complains of headache, great weakness and nausea, and you speak of frequent nose-bleeds during the night. The abdomen is tender upon pressure, which is a symptom I would rather not have found. But I can't make any positive diagnosis as yet. Some big sickness is coming on—that, I am afraid, is certain. I shall come out here to-morrow. But, Mr. Bennett, be careful of yourself. Even steel can weaken, you know. You see this rabble" (he motioned with his head toward the anteroom, where the other visitors were waiting) "that is hounding you? Everybody knows where you are. Man, you must have rest. I don't need to look at you more than once to know that. Get away! Get away even from your mails! Hide from everybody for a while! Don't think you can nurse your friend through these next few weeks, because you can't."

"Well," answered Bennett, "wait a few days. We'll see by the end of the week."

The week passed. Ferriss went gradually from bad to worse, though as yet the disease persistently refused to declare itself. He was quite helpless, and Bennett watched over him night and day, pottering around him by the hour, giving him his medicines, cooking his food, and even when Ferriss complained of the hotness of the bedclothes, changing the very linen that he might lie upon cool sheets. But at the end of the week Dr. Pitts declared that Bennett himself was in great danger of breaking down, and was of no great service to the sick man.

"To-morrow," said the doctor, "I shall have a young fellow here who happens to be a cousin of mine. He is an excellent trained nurse, a fellow we can rely upon. He'll take your place. I'll have him here to-morrow, and you must get away. Hide somewhere. Don't even allow your mail to be forwarded. The nurse and I will take care of Mr. Ferriss. You can leave me your address, and I will wire you if it is necessary. Now be persuaded like a reasonable man. I will stake my professional reputation that you will knock under if you stay here with a sick man on your hands and newspaper men taking the house by storm at all hours of the day. Come now, will you go? Mr. Ferriss is in no danger, and you will do him more harm by staying than by going. So long as you remain here you will have this raft of people in the rooms at all hours. Deny yourself! Keep them out! Keep out the American reporter when he goes gunning for a returned explorer! Do you think this," and he pointed again to the crowd in the anteroom, "is the right condition for a sick man's quarters? You are imperilling his safety, to say nothing of your own, by staying beside him—you draw the fire, Mr. Bennett."

"Well, there's something in that," muttered Bennett, pulling at his mustache. "But—" Bennett hesitated, then: "Pitts, I want you to take my place here if I go away. Have a nurse if you like, but I shouldn't feel justified in leaving the boy in his condition unless I knew you were with him continually. I don't know what your practice is worth to you, say for a month, or until the boy is out of danger, but make me a proposition. I think we can come to an understanding."

"But it won't be necessary to have a doctor with Mr. Ferriss constantly. I should see him every day and the nurse—"

Bennett promptly overrode his objections. Harshly and abruptly he exclaimed: "I'm not taking any chances. It shall be as I say. I want the boy well, and I want you and the nurse to see to it that he gets well. I'll meet the expenses."

Bennett did not hear the doctor's response and his suggestion as to the advisability of taking Ferriss to his own house in the country while he could be moved. For the moment he was not listening. An idea had abruptly presented itself to him. He was to go to the country. But where? A grim smile began to relax the close-gripped lips and the hard set of the protruding jaw. He tugged again at his mustache, scowling at the doctor, trying to hide his humour.

"Well, that's settled then," he said; "I'll get away to-morrow—somewhere."

"Whereabouts?" demanded the doctor. "I shall want to let you know how we progress."

Bennett chose to feel a certain irritation. What business of Pitts was it whom he went to see, or, rather, where he meant to go?

"You told me to hide away from everybody, not even to allow my mail to be forwarded. But I'll let you know where to reach me, of course, as soon as I get there. It won't be far from town."

"And I will take your place here with Mr. Ferriss; somebody will be with him at every moment, and I shall only wire you," continued the doctor, "in case of urgent necessity. I want you to have all the rest you can, and stay away as long as possible. I shan't annoy you with telegrams unless I must. You'll understand that no news is good news."

* * * * *

On that particular morning Lloyd sat in her room in the old farmhouse that she always elected to call her home as often as she visited Bannister. It was some quarter of a mile outside the little village, and on the road that connected it with the railway at Fourth Lake, some six miles over the hills to the east. It was yet early in the morning, and Lloyd was writing letters that she would post at Fourth Lake later in the forenoon. She intended driving over to the lake. Two days before, Lewis had arrived with Rox, the ponies and the phaeton. Lloyd's dog-cart, a very gorgeous, high-wheeled affair, was always kept at Bannister.

The room in which she now sat was delightful. Everything was white, from the curtains of the bed to the chintz hangings on the walls. A rug of white fur was on the floor. The panellings and wooden shutters of the windows were painted white. The fireplace was set in glossy-white tiles, and its opening covered with a screen of white feathers. The windows were flung wide, and a great flood of white sunlight came pouring into the room. Lloyd herself was dressed in white, from the clean, crisp scarf tied about her neck to the tip of her canvas tennis shoes. And in all this array of white only the dull-red flame of her high-piled hair—in the sunshine glowing like burnished copper—set a vivid note of colour, the little strands and locks about her neck and ears coruscating as the breeze from the open windows stirred them.

The morning was veritably royal—still, cool, and odorous of woods and cattle and growing grass. A great sense of gayety, of exhilaration, was in the air. Lloyd was all in tune with it. While she wrote her left elbow rested on the table, and in her left hand she held a huge, green apple, unripe, sour, delicious beyond words, and into which she bit from time to time with the silent enjoyment of a school-girl.

Her letter was to Hattie's father, Mr. Campbell, and she wrote to ask if the little girl might not spend a week with her at Bannister. When the letter was finished and addressed she thrust it into her belt, and, putting on her hat, ran downstairs. Lewis had brought the dog-cart to the gate, and stood waiting in the road by Rox's head. But as Lloyd went down the brick-paved walk of the front yard Mrs. Applegate, who owned the farmhouse, and who was at once Lloyd's tenant, landlady, housekeeper, and cook, appeared on the porch of the house, the head of a fish in her hand, and Charley-Joe, the yellow tomcat, at her heels, eyeing her with painful intentness.

"Say, Miss Searight," she called, her forearm across her forehead to shade her eyes, the hand still holding the fish's head, "say, while you're out this morning will you keep an eye out for that dog of our'n—you know, Dan—the one with liver'n white spots? He's run off again—ain't seen him since yesterday noon. He gets away an' goes off fighting other dogs over the whole blessed county. There ain't a dog big 'r little within ten mile that Dan ain't licked. He'd sooner fight than he would eat, that dog."

"I will, I will," answered Lloyd, climbing to the high seat, "and if I find him I shall drag him back by the scruff of his neck. Good-morning, Lewis. Why have you put the overhead check on Rox?"

Lewis touched his cap.

"He feels his oats some this morning, and if he gets his lower jaw agin' his chest there's no holding of him, Miss—no holding of him in the world."

Lloyd gathered up the reins and spoke to the horse, and Lewis stood aside.

Rox promptly went up into the air on his hind legs, shaking his head with a great snort.

"Steady, you old pig," said Lloyd, calmly. "Soh, soh, who's trying to kill you?"

"Hadn't I better come with you, Miss?" inquired Lewis anxiously.

Lloyd shook her head. "No, indeed," she said decisively.

Rox, after vindicating his own independence by the proper amount of showing off, started away down the road with as high an action as he could command, playing to the gallery, looking back and out of the tail of his eye to see if Lewis observed what a terrible fellow he was that morning.

"Well, of all the critters!" commented Mrs. Applegate from the porch. But Charley-Joe, with an almost hypnotic fixity in his yellow eyes, and who during the last few minutes had several times opened his mouth wide in an ineffectual attempt to mew, suddenly found his voice with a prolonged and complaining note.

"Well, heavens an' airth, take your fish, then!" exclaimed Mrs. Applegate suddenly, remembering the cat. "An' get off'n my porch with it." She pushed him away with the side of her foot, and Charley-Joe, with the fish's head in his teeth, retired around the corner of the house by the rain barrel, where at intervals he could be heard growling to himself in a high-pitched key, pretending the approach of some terrible enemy.

Meanwhile Lloyd, already well on her way, was having an exciting tussle with Rox. The horse had begun by making an exhibition of himself for all who could see, but in the end he had so worked upon his own nerves that instead of frightening others he only succeeded in terrifying himself. He was city-bred, and the sudden change from brick houses to open fields had demoralised him. He began to have a dim consciousness of just how strong he was. There was nothing vicious about him. He would not have lowered himself to kick, but he did want, with all the big, strong heart of him, to run.

But back of him there—he felt it thrilling along the tense-drawn reins—was a calm, powerful grip, even, steady, masterful. Turn his head he could not, but he knew very well that Lloyd had taken a double twist upon the reins, and that her hands, even if they were gloved in white, were strong—strong enough to hold him to his work. And besides this—he could tell it by the very feel of the bit—he knew that she did not take him very seriously, that he could not make her afraid of him. He knew that she could tell at once whether he shied because he was really frightened or because he wanted to break the shaft, and that in the latter case he would get the whip—and mercilessly, too—across his haunch, a degradation, above all things, to be avoided. And she had called him an old pig once already that morning.

Lloyd drove on. She keenly enjoyed this struggle between the horse's strength and her own determination, her own obstinacy. No, she would not let Rox have his way; she would not allow him to triumph over her for a single moment. She would neither be forced nor tricked into yielding a single point however small. She would be mistress of the situation.

By the end of half an hour she had him well in hand, and was bowling smoothly along a level stretch of road at the foot of an abrupt rise of land covered with scrub oak and broken with outcroppings of granite of a curious formation. Just beyond here the road crossed the canal by a narrow—in fact, a much too narrow—plank bridge without guard-rails. The wide-axled dog-cart had just sufficient room on either hand, and Lloyd, too good a whip to take chances with so nervous a horse as Rox, drew him down to a walk as she approached it. But of a sudden her eyes were arrested by a curious sight. She halted the cart.

At the roadside, some fifty yards from the plank bridge, were two dogs. Evidently there had just been a dreadful fight. Here and there a stone was streaked with blood. The grass and smaller bushes were flattened out, and tufts of hair were scattered about upon the ground. Of the two dogs, Lloyd recognised one upon the instant. It was Dan, the "liver'n white" fox-hound of the farmhouse—the fighter and terror of the country. But he was lying upon his side now, the foreleg broken, or rather crushed, as if in a vise; the throat torn open, the life-blood in a great pool about his head. He was dead, or in the very throes of death. Poor Dan, he had fought his last fight, had found more than his match at last.

Lloyd looked at the other dog—the victor; then looked at him a second time and a third.

"Well," she murmured, "that's a strange-looking dog."

In fact, he was a curious animal. His broad, strong body was covered with a brown fur as dense, as thick, and as soft as a wolf's; the ears were pricked and pointed, the muzzle sharp, the eyes slant and beady. The breast was disproportionately broad, the forelegs short and apparently very powerful. Around his neck was a broad nickelled collar.

But as Lloyd sat in the cart watching him he promptly demonstrated the fact that his nature was as extraordinary as his looks. He turned again from a momentary inspection of the intruders, sniffed once or twice at his dead enemy, then suddenly began to eat him.

Lloyd's gorge rose with anger and disgust. Even if Dan had been killed, it had been in fair fight, and there could be no doubt that Dan himself had been the aggressor. She could even feel a little respect for the conqueror of the champion, but to turn upon the dead foe, now that the heat of battle was past, and (in no spirit of hate or rage) deliberately to eat him. What a horror! She took out her whip.

"Shame on you!" she exclaimed. "Ugh! what a savage; I shan't allow you!"

A farm-hand was coming across the plank bridge, and as he drew near the cart Lloyd asked him to hold Rox for a moment. Rox was one of those horses who, when standing still, are docile as a kitten, and she had no hesitancy in leaving him with a man at his head. She jumped out, the whip in her hand. Dan was beyond all help, but she wanted at least to take his collar back to Mrs. Applegate. The strange dog permitted himself to be driven off a little distance. Part of his strangeness seemed to be that through it all he retained a certain placidity of temper. There was no ferocity in his desire to eat Dan.

"That's just what makes it so disgusting," said Lloyd, shaking her whip at him. He sat down upon his haunches, eyeing her calmly, his tongue lolling. When she had unbuckled Dan's collar and tossed it into the cart under the seat she inquired of the farm-hand as to where the new dog came from.

"It beats me, Miss Searight," he answered; "never saw such a bird in these parts before; t'other belongs down to Applegate's."

"Come, let's have a look at you," said Lloyd, putting back the whip; "let me see your collar."

Disregarding the man's warning, she went up to the stranger, whistling and holding out her hand, and he came up to her—a little suspiciously at first, but in the end wagging his tail, willing to be friendly. Lloyd parted the thick fur around his neck and turned the plate of the collar to the light. On the plate was engraved: "Kamiska, Arctic S.S. 'Freja.' Return to Ward Bennett."

"Anything on the collar?" asked the man.

Lloyd settled a hairpin in a coil of hair at the back of her neck.

"Nothing—nothing that I can make out."

She climbed into the cart again and dismissed the farm-hand with a quarter. He disappeared around the turn of the road. But as she was about to drive on, Lloyd heard a great clattering of stones upon the hill above her, a crashing in the bushes, and a shrill whistle thrice repeated. Kamiska started up at once, cocking alternate ears, then turned about and ran up the hill to meet Ward Bennett, who came scrambling down, jumping from one granite outcrop to another, holding on the whiles by the lower branches of the scrub oak-trees.

He was dressed as if for an outing, in knickerbockers and huge, hob-nailed shoes. He wore an old shooting-coat and a woollen cap; a little leather sack was slung from his shoulder, and in his hand he carried a short-handled geologist's hammer.

And then, after so long a time, Lloyd saw his face again—the rugged, unhandsome face; the massive jaw, huge almost to deformity; the great, brutal, indomitable lips; the square-cut chin with its forward, aggressive thrust; the narrow forehead, seamed and contracted, and the twinkling, keen eyes so marred by the cast, so heavily shadowed by the shaggy eyebrows. When he spoke the voice came heavy and vibrant from the great chest, a harsh, deep bass, a voice in which to command men, not a voice in which to talk to women.

Lloyd, long schooled to self-repression and the control of her emotions when such repression and control were necessary, sat absolutely moveless on her high seat, her hands only shutting tighter and tighter upon the reins. She had often wondered how she would feel, what was to be her dominant impulse, at such moments as these, and now she realised that it was not so much joy, not so much excitement, as a resolute determination not for one instant to lose her poise.

She was thinking rapidly. For four years they had not met. At one time she believed him to be dead. But in the end he had been saved, had come back, and, ignoring the plaudits of an entire Christendom, had addressed himself straight to her. For one of them, at least, this meeting was a crisis. What would they first say to each other? how be equal to the situation? how rise to its dramatic possibilities? But the moment had come to them suddenly, had found them all unprepared. There was no time to think of adequate words. Afterward, when she reviewed this encounter, she told herself that they both had failed, and that if the meeting had been faithfully reproduced upon the stage or in the pages of a novel it would have seemed tame and commonplace. These two, living the actual scene, with all the deep, strong, real emotions of them surging to the surface, the vitality of them, all aroused and vibrating, suddenly confronting actuality itself, were not even natural; were not even "true to life." It was as though they had parted but a fortnight ago.

Bennett caught his cap from his head and came toward her, exclaiming:

"Miss Searight, I believe."

And she, reaching her right hand over the left, that still held the reins, leaned from her high seat, shaking hands with him and replying:

"Well—Mr. Bennett, I'm so very glad to see you again. Where did you come from?"

"From the City—and from seventy-six degrees north latitude."

"I congratulate you. We had almost given up hope of you."

"Thank you," he answered. "We were not so roseate with hope ourselves—all the time. But I have not felt as though I had really come back until this—well, until I had reached—the road between Bannister and Fourth Lake, for instance," and his face relaxed to its characteristic grim smile.

"You reached it too late, then," she responded. "Your dog has killed our Dan, and, what is much worse, started to eat him. He's a perfect savage."

"Kamiska? Well," he added, reflectively, "it's my fault for setting her a bad example. I ate her trace-mate, and was rather close to eating Kamiska herself at one time. But I didn't come down here to talk about that."

"You are looking rather worn, Mr. Bennett."

"I suppose. The doctor sent me into the country to call back the roses to my pallid cheek. So I came down here—to geologise. I presume that excuse will do as well as another." Then suddenly he cried: "Hello, steady there; quick, Miss Searight!"

It all came so abruptly that neither of them could afterward reconstruct the scene with any degree of accuracy. Probably in scrambling down the steep slope of the bank Bennett had loosened the earth or smaller stones that hitherto had been barely sufficient support to the mass of earth, gravel, rocks, and bushes that all at once, and with a sharp, crackling noise, slid downward toward the road from the overhanging bank. The slip was small, hardly more than three square yards of earth moving from its place, but it came with a smart, quick rush, throwing up a cloud of dust and scattering pebbles and hard clods of dirt far before its advance.

As Rox leaped Lloyd threw her weight too suddenly on the reins, the horse arched his neck, and the overhead check snapped like a harp-string. Again he reared from the object of his terror, shaking his head from side to side, trying to get a purchase on the bit. Then his lower jaw settled against his chest, and all at once he realised that no pair of human hands could hold him now. He did not rear again; his haunches suddenly lowered, and with the hoofs of his hind feet he began feeling the ground for his spring. But now Bennett was at his head, gripping at the bit, striving to thrust him back. Lloyd, half risen from her seat, each rein wrapped twice around her hands, her long, strong arms at their fullest reach, held back against the horse with all her might, her body swaying and jerking with his plunges. But the overhead check once broken Lloyd might as well have pulled against a locomotive. Bennett was a powerful man by nature, but his great strength had been not a little sapped by his recent experiences. Between the instant his hand caught at the bit and that in which Rox had made his first ineffectual attempt to spring forward he recognised the inequality of the contest. He could hold Rox back for a second or two, perhaps three, then the horse would get away from him. He shot a glance about him. Not twenty yards away was the canal and the perilously narrow bridge—the bridge without the guard-rail.

"Quick, Miss Searight!" he shouted. "Jump! We can't hold him. Quick, do as I tell you, jump!"

But even as he spoke Rox dragged him from his feet, his hoofs trampling the hollow road till it reverberated like the roll of drums. Bracing himself against every unevenness of the ground, his teeth set, his face scarlet, the veins in his neck swelling, suddenly blue-black, Bennett wrenched at the bit till the horse's mouth went bloody. But all to no purpose; faster and faster Rox was escaping from his control.

"Jump, I tell you!" he shouted again, looking over his shoulder; "another second and he's away."

Lloyd dropped the reins and turned to jump. But the lap-robe had slipped down to the bottom of the cart when she had risen, and was in a tangle about her feet. The cart was rocking like a ship in a storm. Twice she tried to free herself, holding to the dashboard with one hand. Then the cart suddenly lurched forward and she fell to her knees. Rox was off; it was all over.

Not quite. In one brief second of time—a hideous vision come and gone between two breaths—Lloyd saw the fearful thing done there in the road, almost within reach of her hand. She saw the man and horse at grapples, the yellow reach of road that lay between her and the canal, the canal itself, and the narrow bridge. Then she saw the short-handled geologist's hammer gripped in Bennett's fist heave high in the air. Down it came, swift, resistless, terrible—one blow. The cart tipped forward as Rox, his knees bowing from under him, slowly collapsed. Then he rolled upon the shaft that snapped under him, and the cart vibrated from end to end as a long, shuddering tremble ran through him with his last deep breath.



V.

When Lloyd at length managed to free herself and jump to the ground Bennett came quickly toward her and drew her away to the side of the road.

"Are you hurt?" he demanded. "Tell me, are you hurt?"

"No, no; not in the least."

"Why in the world did you want to drive such a horse? Don't ever take such chances again. I won't have it."

For a few moments Lloyd was too excited to trust herself to talk, and could only stand helplessly to one side, watching Bennett as he stripped off the harness from the dead horse, stowed it away under the seat of the cart, and rolled the cart itself to the edge of the road. Then at length she said, trying to smile and to steady her voice:

"It—it seems to me, Mr. Bennett, you do about—about as you like with my sta-bub-ble."

"Sit down!" he commanded, "you are trembling all over. Sit down on that rock there."

"—and with me," she added, sinking down upon the boulder he had indicated with a movement of his head, his hands busy with the harness.

"I'm sorry I had to do that," he explained; "but there was no help for it—nothing else to do. He would have had you in the canal in another second, if he did not kill you on the way there."

"Poor old Rox," murmured Lloyd; "I was very fond of Rox."

Bennett put himself in her way as she stepped forward. He had the lap-robe over his arm and the whip in his hand.

"No, don't look at him. He's not a pretty sight. Come, shall I take you home? Don't worry about the cart; I will see that it is sent back."

"And that Rox is buried—somewhere? I don't want him left out there for the crows." In spite of Bennett's injunction she looked over her shoulder for a moment as they started off down the road. "I only hope you were sure there was nothing else to do, Mr. Bennett," she said.

"There was no time to think," he answered, "and I wasn't taking any chances."

But the savagery of the whole affair stuck in Lloyd's imagination. There was a primitiveness, a certain hideous simplicity in the way Bennett had met the situation that filled her with wonder and with even a little terror and mistrust of him. The vast, brutal directness of the deed was out of place and incongruous at this end-of-the-century time. It ignored two thousand years of civilisation. It was a harsh, clanging, brazen note, powerful, uncomplicated, which came jangling in, discordant and inharmonious with the tune of the age. It savoured of the days when men fought the brutes with their hands or with their clubs. But also it was an indication of a force and a power of mind that stopped at nothing to attain its ends, that chose the shortest cut, the most direct means, disdainful of hesitation, holding delicacy and finessing in measureless contempt, rushing straight to its object, driving in, breaking down resistance, smashing through obstacles with a boundless, crude, blind Brobdignag power, to oppose which was to be trampled under foot upon the instant.

It was long before their talk turned from the incident of the morning, but when it did its subject was Richard Ferriss. Bennett was sounding his praises and commending upon his pluck and endurance during the retreat from the ship, when Lloyd, after hesitating once or twice, asked:

"How is Mr. Ferriss? In your note you said he was ill."

"So he is," he told her, "and I could not have left him if I was not sure I was doing him harm by staying. But the doctor is to wire me if he gets any worse, and only if he does. I am to believe that no news is good news."

But this meeting with Lloyd and the intense excitement of those few moments by the canal had quite driven from Bennett's mind the fact that he had not forwarded his present address either to Ferriss or to his doctor. He had so intended that morning, but all the faculties of his mind were suddenly concentrated upon another issue. For the moment he believed that he had actually written to Dr. Pitts, as he had planned, and when he thought of his intended message at all, thought of it as an accomplished fact. The matter did not occur to him again.

As he walked by Lloyd's side, listening to her and talking to her, snapping the whip the while, or flicking the heads from the mullein stalks by the roadside with its lash, he was thinking how best he might say to her what he had come from the City to say. To lead up to his subject, to guide the conversation, to prepare the right psychological moment skilfully and without apparent effort, were maneuvers in the game that Bennett ignored and despised. He knew only that he loved her, that she was there at his side, that the object of all his desires and hopes was within his reach. Straight as a homing pigeon he went to his goal.

"Miss Searight," he began, his harsh, bass voice pitched even lower than usual, "what do you think I am down here for? This is not the only part of the world where I could recuperate, I suppose, and as for spending God's day in chipping at stones, like a professor of a young ladies' seminary"—he hurled the hammer from him into the bushes—"that for geology! Now we can talk. You know very well that I love you, and I believe that you love me. I have come down here to ask you to marry me."

Lloyd might have done any one of a dozen things—might have answered in any one of a dozen ways. But what she did do, what she did say, took Bennett completely by surprise. A little coldly and very calmly she answered:

"You believe—you say you believe that I—" she broke off, then began again: "It is not right for you to say that to me. I have never led you to believe that I cared for you. Whatever our relations are to be, let us have that understood at once."

Bennett uttered an impatient exclamation "I am not good at fencing and quibbling," he declared. "I tell you that I love you with all my heart. I tell you that I want you to be my wife, and I tell you that I know you do love me. You are not like other women; why should you coquette with me? Good God! Are you not big enough to be above such things? I know you are. Of all the people in the world we two ought to be above pretence, ought to understand each other. If I did not know you cared for me I would not have spoken."

"I don't understand you," she answered. "I think we had better talk of other things this morning."

"I came down here to talk of just this and nothing else," he declared.

"Very well, then," she said, squaring her shoulders with a quick, brisk movement, "we will talk of it. You say we two should understand each other. Let us come to the bottom of things at once. I despise quibbling and fencing as much, perhaps, as you. Tell me how have I ever led you to believe that I cared for you?"

"At a time when our last hope was gone," answered Bennett, meeting her eyes, "when I was very near to death and thought that I should go to my God within the day, I was made happier than I think I ever was in my life before by finding out that I was dear to you—that you loved me."

Lloyd searched his face with a look of surprise and bewilderment.

"I do not understand you," she repeated.

"Oh!" exclaimed Bennett with sudden vehemence, "you could say it to Ferriss; why can't you say it to me?"

"To Mr. Ferriss?"

"You could tell him that you cared."

"I—tell Mr. Ferriss—that I cared for you?" She began to smile. "You are a little absurd, Mr. Bennett."

"And I cannot see why you should deny it now. Or if anything has caused you to change your mind—to be sorry for what you said, why should I not know it? Even a petty thief may be heard in his own defence. I loved you because I believed you to be a woman, a great, strong, noble, man's woman, above little things, above the little, niggling, contemptible devices of the drawing-room. I loved you because the great things of the world interested you, because you had no place in your life for petty graces, petty affectations, petty deceits and shams and insincerities. If you did not love me, why did you say so? If you do love me now, why should you not admit it? Do you think you can play with me? Do you think you can coquette with me? If you were small enough to stoop to such means, do you think I am small enough to submit to them? I have known Ferriss too well. I know him to be incapable of such falsity as you would charge him with. To have told such a lie, such an uncalled-for, useless, gratuitous lie, is a thing he could not have done. You must have told him that you cared. Why aren't you—you of all women—brave enough, strong enough, big enough to stand by your words?"

"Because I never said them. What do you think of me? Even if I did care, do you suppose I would say as much—and to another man? Oh!" she exclaimed with sudden indignation, "let's talk of something else. This is too—preposterous."

"You never told Ferriss that you cared for me?"

"No."

Bennett took off his cap. "Very well, then. That is enough. Good-bye, Miss Searight."

"Do you believe I told Mr. Ferriss I loved you?"

"I do not believe that the man who has been more to me than a brother is a liar and a rascal."

"Good-morning, Mr. Bennett."

They had come rather near to the farmhouse by this time. Without another word Bennett gave the whip and the lap-robe into her hands, and, turning upon his heel, walked away down the road.

Lloyd told Lewis as much of the morning's accident by the canal as was necessary, and gave orders about the dog-cart and the burying of Rox. Then slowly, her eyes fixed and wide, she went up to her own room and, without removing either her hat or her gloves, sat down upon the edge of the bed, letting her hands fall limply into her lap, gazing abstractedly at the white curtain just stirring at the open window.

She could not say which hurt her most—that Ferriss had told the lie or that Bennett believed it. But why, in heaven's name why, had Ferriss so spoken to Bennett; what object had he in view; what had he to gain by it? Why had Ferriss, the man who loved her, chosen so to humiliate her, to put her in a position so galling to her pride, her dignity? Bennett, too, loved her. How could he believe that she had so demeaned herself?

She had been hurt and to the heart, at a point where she believed herself most unassailable, and he who held the weapon was the man that with all the heart of her and soul of her she loved.

Much of the situation was all beyond her. Try as she would she could not understand. One thing, however, she saw clearly, unmistakably: Bennett believed that she loved him, believed that she had told as much to Ferriss, and that when she had denied all knowledge of Ferriss's lie she was only coquetting with him. She knew Bennett and his character well enough to realise that an idea once rooted in his mind was all but ineradicable. Bennett was not a man of easy changes; nothing mobile about him.

The thought of this belief of Bennett's was intolerable. As she sat there alone in her white room the dull crimson of her cheeks flamed suddenly scarlet, and with a quick, involuntary gesture she threw her hand, palm outward, across her face to hide it from the sunlight. She went quickly from one mood to another. Now her anger grew suddenly hot against Ferriss. How had he dared? How had he dared to put this indignity, this outrageous insult, upon her? Now her wrath turned upon Bennett. What audacity had been his to believe that she would so forget herself? She set her teeth in her impotent anger, rising to her feet, her hands clenching, tears of sheer passion starting to her eyes.

For the greater part of the afternoon she kept to her room, pacing the floor from wall to wall, trying to think clearly, to resolve upon something that would readjust the situation, that would give her back her peace of mind, her dignity, and her happiness of the early morning. For now the great joy that had come to her in his safe return was all but gone. For one moment she even told herself she could not love him, but the next was willing to admit that it was only because of her love of him, as strong and deep as ever, that the humiliation cut so deeply and cruelly now. Ferriss had lied about her, and Bennett had believed the lie. To meet Bennett again under such circumstances was not to be thought of for one moment. Her vacation was spoiled; the charm of the country had vanished. Lloyd returned to the City the next day.

She found that she was glad to get back to her work. The subdued murmur of the City that hourly assaulted her windows was a relief to her ears after the profound and numbing silence of the country. The square was never so beautiful as at this time of summer, and even the restless shadow pictures, that after dark were thrown upon the ceiling of her room by the electrics shining through the great elms in the square below, were a pleasure.

On the morning after her arrival and as she was unpacking her trunk Miss Douglass came into her room and seated herself, according to her custom, on the couch. After some half-hour's give-and-take talk, the fever nurse said:

"Do you remember, Lloyd, what I told you about typhoid in the spring—that it was almost epidemic?"

Lloyd nodded, turning about from her trunk, her arms full of dresses.

"It's worse than ever now," continued Miss Douglass; "three of our people have been on cases only in the short time you have been away. And there's a case out in Medford that has killed one nurse."

"Well!" exclaimed Lloyd in some astonishment, "it seems to me that one should confine typhoid easily enough."

"Not always, not always," answered the other; "a virulent case would be quite as bad as yellow fever or smallpox. You remember when we were at the hospital Miss Helmuth, that little Polish nurse, contracted it from her case and died even before her patient did. Then there was Eva Blayne. She very nearly died. I did like the way Miss Wakeley took this case out at Medford even when the other nurse had died. She never hesitated for—"

"Has one of our people got this case?" inquired Lloyd.

"Of course. Didn't I tell you?"

"I hope we cure it," said Lloyd, her trunk-tray in her hands. "I don't think we have ever lost a case yet when good nursing could pull it through, and in typhoid the whole treatment really is the nursing."

"Lloyd," said Miss Douglass decisively, "I would give anything I can think of now to have been on that hip disease case of yours and have brought my patient through as you did. You should hear what Dr. Street says of you—and the little girl's father. By the way, I had nearly forgotten. Hattie Campbell—that's her name, isn't it?—telephoned to know if you had come back from the country yet. That was yesterday. I said we expected you to-day, and she told me to say she was coming to see you."

The next afternoon toward three o'clock Hattie and her father drove to the square in an open carriage, Hattie carrying a great bunch of violets for Lloyd. The little invalid was well on the way to complete recovery by now. Sometimes she was allowed to walk a little, but as often as not her maid wheeled her about in an invalid's chair. She drove out in the carriage frequently by way of exercise. She would, no doubt, always limp a little, but in the end it was certain she would be sound and strong. For Hattie and her father Lloyd had become a sort of tutelary semi-deity. In what was left of the family she had her place, hardly less revered than even the dead wife. Campbell himself, who had made a fortune in Bessemer steel, a well-looking, well-groomed gentleman, smooth-shaven and with hair that was none too gray, more than once caught himself standing before Lloyd's picture that stood on the mantelpiece in Hattie's room, looking at it vaguely as he clipped the nib from his cigar.

But on this occasion as the carriage stopped in front of the ample pile of the house Hattie called out, "Oh, there she is now," and Lloyd came down the steps, carrying her nurse's bag in her hand.

"Are we too late?" began Hattie; "are you going out; are you on a case? Is that why you've got your bag? We thought you were on a vacation."

Campbell, yielding to a certain feeling of uneasiness that Lloyd should stand on the curb while he remained seated, got out of the carriage and stood at her side, gravely listening to the talk between the nurse and her one-time patient. Lloyd was obliged to explain, turning now to Hattie, now to her father. She told them that she was in something of a hurry. She had just been specially called to take a very bad case of typhoid fever in a little suburb of the City, called Medford. It was not her turn to go, but the physicians in charge of the case, as sometimes happened, had asked especially for her.

"One of our people, a young woman named Miss Wakeley, has been on this case," she continued, "but it seems she has allowed herself to contract the disease herself. She went to the hospital this noon."

Campbell, his gravity suddenly broken up, exclaimed:

"Surely, Miss Searight, this is not the same case I read of in yesterday's paper—it must be, too—Medford was the name of the place. That case has killed one nurse already, and now the second one is down. Don't tell me you are going to take the same case."

"It is the same case," answered Lloyd, "and, of course, I am going to take it. Did you ever hear of a nurse doing otherwise? Why, it would seem—seem so—funny—"

There was no dissuading her, and Campbell and Hattie soon ceased even to try. She was impatient to be gone. The station was close at hand, and she would not hear of taking the carriage thither. However, before she left them she recurred again to the subject of her letter to Mr. Campbell, and then and there it was decided that Hattie and her maid should spend the following ten days at Lloyd's place in Bannister. The still country air, now that Hattie was able to take the short journey, would be more to her than many medicines, and the ponies and Lloyd's phaeton would be left there with Lewis for her use.

"And write often, won't you, Miss Searight?" exclaimed Hattie as Lloyd was saying good-bye. Lloyd shook her head.

"Not that of all things," she answered. "If I did that we might have you, too, down with typhoid. But you may write to me, and I hope you will," and she gave Hattie her new address.

"Harriet," said Campbell as the carriage drove back across the square, the father and daughter waving their hands to Lloyd, briskly on her way to the railroad station, "Harriet."

"Yes, papa."

"There goes a noble woman. Pluck, intelligence, strong will—she has them all—and a great big heart that—heart that—" He clipped the end of a cigar thoughtfully and fell silent.

A day or two later, as Hattie was sitting in her little wheel-chair on the veranda of Mrs. Applegate's house watching Charley-Joe hunting grasshoppers underneath the currant bushes, she was surprised by the sharp closing of the front gate. A huge man with one squint eye and a heavy, square-cut jaw was coming up the walk, followed by a strange-looking dog. Charley-Joe withdrew, swiftly to his particular hole under the veranda, moving rapidly, his body low to the ground, and taking an unnecessary number of very short steps.

The little city-bred girl distinguished the visitor from a country man at once. Hattie had ideas of her own as to propriety, and so rose to her feet as Bennett came up, and after a moment's hesitation made him a little bow. Bennett at once gravely took off his cap.

"Excuse me," he said as though Hattie were twenty-five instead of twelve. "Is Miss Searight at home?"

"Oh," exclaimed Hattie, delighted, "do you know Miss Searight? She was my nurse when I was so sick—because you know I had hip disease and there was an operation. No, she's not here any more. She's gone away, gone back to the City."

"Gone back to the City?"

"Yes, three or four days ago. But I'm going to write to her this afternoon. Shall I say who called?" Then, without waiting for a reply, she added, "I guess I had better introduce myself. My name is Harriet Campbell, and my papa is Craig V. Campbell, of the Hercules Wrought Steel Company in the City. Won't you have a chair?"

The little convalescent and the arctic explorer shook hands with great solemnity.

"I'm so pleased to meet you," said Bennett. "I haven't a card, but my name is Ward Bennett—of the Freja expedition," he added. But, to his relief, the little girl had not heard of him.

"Very well," she said, "I'll tell Miss Searight Mr. Bennett called."

"No," he replied, hesitatingly, "no, you needn't do that."

"Why, she won't answer my letter, you know," explained Hattie, "because she is afraid her letters would give me typhoid fever, that they might"—she continued carefully, hazarding a remembered phrase—"carry the contagion. You see she has gone to nurse a dreadful case of typhoid fever out at Medford, near the City, and we're so worried and anxious about her—papa and I. One nurse that had this case has died already and another one has caught the disease and is very sick, and Miss Searight, though she knew just how dangerous it was, would go, just like—like—" Hattie hesitated, then confused memories of her school reader coming to her, finished with "like Casabianca."

"Oh," said Bennett, turning his head so as to fix her with his own good eye. "She has gone to nurse a typhoid fever patient, has she?"

"Yes, and papa told me—" and Hattie became suddenly very grave, "that we might—might—oh, dear—never see her again."

"Hum! Whereabouts is this place in Medford? She gave you her address; what is it?" Hattie told him, and he took himself abruptly away.

Bennett had gone some little distance down the road before the real shock came upon him. Lloyd was in a position of imminent peril; her life was in the issue. With blind, unreasoned directness he leaped at once to this conclusion, and as he strode along with teeth and fists tight shut he kept muttering to himself: "She may die, she may die—we—we may never see her again." Then suddenly came the fear, the sickening sink of heart, the choke at the throat, first the tightening and then the sudden relaxing of all the nerves. Lashed and harried by the sense of a fearful calamity, an unspeakable grief that was pursuing after him, Bennett did not stop to think, to reflect. He chose instantly to believe that Lloyd was near her death, and once the idea was fixed in his brain it was not thereafter to be reasoned away. Suddenly, at a turn in the road, he stopped, his hands deep in his pockets, his bootheel digging into the ground. "Now, then," he exclaimed, "what's to be done?"