And how complete now was Bennett’s defeat!  The very contingency he had fought so desperately to avert and for which he had sacrificed Ferriss—­Lloyd’s care of so perilous a disease—­behold! the mysterious turn of the wheel had brought it about, and now he was powerless to resist.

“Oh!” he cried, “have I not enough upon my mind already—­Ferriss and his death?  Are you going to make me imperil your life too, and after I have tried so hard?  You must not stay here.”

“I shall stay,” she answered.

“I order you to go.  This is my house.  Send the doctor here.  Where’s Adler?” Suddenly he fainted.

An hour or two later, in the gray of the morning, at a time when Bennett was sleeping quietly under the influence of opiates, Lloyd found herself sitting at the window in front of the small table there, her head resting on her hand, thoughtful, absorbed, and watching with but half-seeing eyes the dawn growing pink over the tops of the apple-trees in the orchard near by.

The window was open just wide enough for the proper ventilation of the room.  For a long time she sat thus without moving, only from time to time smoothing back the heavy, bronze-red hair from her temples and ears.  By degrees the thinking faculties of her brain, as it were, a myriad of delicate interlacing wheels, slowly decreased in the rapidity and intensity of their functions.  She began to feel instead of to think.  As the activity of her mind lapsed to a certain pleasant numbness, a vague, formless, nameless emotion seemed to be welling to the surface.  It was no longer a question of the brain.  What then?  Was it the heart?  She gave no name to this new emotion; it was too confused as yet, too undefinable.  A certain great sweetness seemed to be coming upon her, but she could not say whether she was infinitely sad or supremely happy; a smile was on her lips, and yet the tears began to brim in her dull-blue eyes.

She felt as if some long, fierce struggle, or series of struggles, were at last accomplished; as if for a long period of time she had been involved in the maze and tortuous passages of some gloomy cavern, but at length, thence issuing, had again beheld the stars.  A great tenderness, a certain tremulous joy in all things that were true and good and right, grew big and strong within her; the delight in living returned to her.  The dawn was brightening and flushing over all the world, and colour, light, and warmth were coming back into her life.  The night had been still and mild, but now the first breath of the morning breeze stirred in the trees, in the grass, in the flowers, and the thick, dew-drenched bushes along the roadside, and a delicious aroma of fields and woods and gardens came to her.  The sweetness of life and the sweetness of those things better than life and more enduring, the things that do not fail, nor cease, nor vanish away, suddenly entered into that room and descended upon her almost in the sense of a benediction, a visitation, something mystic and miraculous.  It was a moment to hope all things, to believe all things, to endure all things.