Miss Douglass was evidently much confused.

Her meeting with Lloyd had apparently been unexpected.  She halted upon the stairs in great embarrassment, stammering: 

“No—­no, I’m on call.  I—­I was called out of my turn—­specially called—­that was it.”

“Were you?” demanded Lloyd sharply, for the other nurse was disturbed to an extraordinary degree.

“Well, then; no, I wasn’t, but the superintendent—­Miss Bergyn—­she thought—­she advised—­you had better see her.”

“I will see her,” declared Lloyd, “but don’t you go till I find out why I was skipped.”

Lloyd hurried at once to Miss Bergyn’s room, indignant at this slight.  Surely, after what had happened, she was entitled to more consideration than this.  Of all the staff in the house she should have been the one to be preferred.

Miss Bergyn rose at Lloyd’s sudden entrance into her room, and to her question responded: 

“It was only because I wanted to spare you further trouble and—­and embarrassment, Lloyd, that I told Miss Douglass to take your place.  This call is from Medford.  Dr. Pitts was here himself this morning, and he thought as I did.”

“Thought what?  I don’t understand.”

“It seemed to me,” answered the superintendent nurse, “that this one case of all others would be the hardest, the most disagreeable for you to take.  It seems that Mr. Bennett has leased Dr. Pitts’s house from him.  He is there now.  At the time when Mr. Ferriss was beginning to be ill Mr. Bennett was with him a great deal and undertook to nurse him till Dr. Pitts interfered and put a professional nurse on the case.  Since then, too, the doctor has found out that Mr. Bennett has exposed himself imprudently.  At any rate, in some way he has contracted the same disease and is rather seriously ill with it.  Dr. Pitts wants us to send him a nurse at once.  It just happened that it was your turn, and I thought I had better skip your name and send Louise Douglass.”

Lloyd sank into a chair, her hands falling limply in her lap.  A frown of perplexity gathered on her forehead.  But suddenly she exclaimed: 

“I know—­that’s all as it may be; but all the staff know that it is my turn to go; everybody in the house knows who is on call.  How will it be—­what will be thought when it is known that I haven’t gone—­and after—­after my failing once—­after this—­this other affair?  No, I must go.  I, of all people, must go—­and just because it is a typhoid case, like the other.”

“But, Lloyd, how can you?”

True, how could she?  Her patient would be the same man who had humiliated her and broken her, had so cruelly misunderstood and wronged her, for whom all her love was dead.  How could she face him again?  Yet how refuse to take the case?  How explain a second failure to her companions?  Lloyd made a little movement of distress, clasping her hands together.  How the complications followed