fast upon each other!  No sooner was one difficult situation met and disposed of than another presented itself.  Bennett was nothing to her now, yet, for all that, she recoiled instinctively from meeting him again.  Not only must she meet him, but she must be with him day after day, hour after hour, at his very side, in all the intimacy that the sick-room involved.  On the other hand, how could she decline this case?  The staff might condone one apparent and inexplicable defection; another would certainly not be overlooked.  But was not this new situation a happy and unlooked-for opportunity to vindicate her impaired prestige in the eyes of her companions?  Lloyd made up her mind upon the instant.  She rose.

“I shall take the case,” she said.

She was not a little surprised at herself.  Hardly an instant had she hesitated.  On that other occasion when she had believed it right to make confession to her associates it had been hard—­at times almost impossible—­for her to do her duty as she saw and understood it.  This new complication was scarcely less difficult, but once having attained the fine, moral rigour that had carried her through her former ordeal, it became easy now to do right under all or any circumstances, however adverse.  If she had failed then, she certainly would have failed now.  That she had succeeded then made it all the easier to succeed now.  Dimly Lloyd commenced to understand that the mastery of self, the steady, firm control of natural, intuitive impulses, selfish because natural, was a progression.  Each victory not only gained the immediate end in view, but braced the mind and increased the force of will for the next shock, the next struggle.  She had imagined and had told herself that Bennett had broken her strength for good.  But was it really so?  Had not defeat in that case been only temporary?  Was she not slowly getting back her strength by an unflinching adherence to the simple, fundamental principles of right, and duty, and truth?  Was not the struggle with one’s self the greatest fight of all, greater, far greater, than had been the conflict between Bennett’s will and her own?

Within the hour she found herself once again on her way to Medford.  How much had happened, through what changes had she passed since the occasion of her first journey; and Bennett, how he, too, changed; how different he had come to stand in her estimation!  Once the thought that he was in danger had been a constant terror to her, and haunted her days and lurked at her side through many a waking night.  Was it possible that now his life or death was no more to her than that of any of her former patients?  She could not say; she avoided answering the question.  Certainly her heart beat no faster at this moment to know that he was in the grip of a perilous disease.  She told herself that her Bennett was dead already; that she was coming back to Medford not to care for and watch over the individual, but to combat the disease.