When she arrived at the doctor’s house in Medford, a strange-looking man opened the door for her, and asked immediately if she was the nurse.

“Yes,” said Lloyd, “I am.  Is Dr. Pitts here?”

“Upstairs in his room,” answered the other in a whisper, closing the front door with infinite softness.  “He won’t let me go in, the doctor won’t; I—­I ain’t seen him in four days.  Ask the doctor if I can’t just have a blink at him—­just a little blink through the crack of the door.  Just think, Miss, I ain’t seen him in four days!  Just think of that!  And look here, they ain’t giving him enough to eat—­nothing but milk and chicken soup with rice in it.  He never did like rice; that’s no kind of rations for a sick man.  I fixed him up a bit of duff yesterday, what he used to like so much aboard ship, and Pitts wouldn’t let him have it.  He regularly laughed in my face.”

Lloyd sent word to the doctor by the housekeeper that she had arrived, and on going up found Pitts waiting for her at the door of the sick-room, not that which had been occupied by Ferriss, but another—­the guest-chamber of the house, situated toward the rear of the building.

“Why, I expected Miss Douglass!” exclaimed the doctor in a low voice as soon as his eye fell upon Lloyd.  “Any one of them but you!”

“I had to come,” Lloyd answered quietly, flushing hotly for all that.  “It was my turn, and it was not right for me to stay away.”

The doctor hesitated an instant, and then dismissed the subject, putting his chin in the air as if to say that, after all, it was not his affair.

“Well,” he said, “it’s queer to see how things will tangle themselves sometimes.  I don’t know whether he took this thing from Ferriss or not.  Both of them were exposed to the same conditions when their expedition went to pieces and they were taken off by the whaling ships—­bad water, weakened constitution, not much power of resistance; in prime condition for the bacillus, and the same cause might have produced the same effect; at any rate, he’s in a bad way.”

“Is he—­very bad?” asked Lloyd.

“Well, he’s not the hang-on sort that Mr. Ferriss was; nothing undecided about Captain Ward Bennett; when he’s sick, he’s sick; rushes right at it like a blind bull.  He’s as bad now as Mr. Ferriss was in his third week.”

“Do you think he will recognise me?”

The doctor shook his head.  “No; delirious most of the time—­of course—­regulation thing.  If we don’t keep the fever down he’ll go out sure.  That’s the danger in his case.  Look at him yourself; here he is.  The devil!  The animal is sitting up again.”