“Lloyd, do you love me?”

“With all my heart, Ward.”

“And you will be my wife?”

“You know that I will.”

“Then”—­Bennett picked up the little volume of “Arctic Research” which he had received that morning, and tossed it from him upon the floor—­“that, for my career,” he answered.

For a moment they were silent, looking gladly into each other’s eyes.  Then Bennett drew her to him again and held her close to him, and once more she put her arms around his neck and nestled her head down upon his shoulder with a little comfortable sigh of contentment and relief and quiet joy, for that the long, fierce trial was over; that there were no more fights to be fought, no more grim, hard situations to face, no more relentless duties to be done.  She had endured and she had prevailed; now her reward was come.  Now for the long, calm years of happiness.

Later in the day, about an hour after noon, Bennett took his daily nap, carefully wrapped in shawls and stretched out in a wicker steamer-chair in the glass-room.  Lloyd, in the meantime, was busy in the garden at the side of the house, gathering flowers which she intended to put in a huge china bowl in Bennett’s room.  While she was thus occupied Adler, followed by Kamiska, came up.  Adler pulled off his cap.

“I beg pardon, Miss,” he began, turning his cap about between his fingers.  “I don’t want to seem to intrude, and if I do I just guess you’d better tell me so first off.  But what did he say—­or did he say anything—­the captain, I mean—­this morning about going up again?  I heard you talking to him at breakfast.  That’s it, that’s the kind of talk he needs.  I can’t talk that talk to him.  I’m so main scared of him.  I wouldn’t ‘a’ believed the captain would ever say he’d give up, would ever say he was beaten.  But, Miss, I’m thinking as there’s something wrong, main wrong with the captain these days besides fever.  He’s getting soft—­that’s what he is.  If you’d only know the man that he was—­before—­while we was up there in the Ice!  That’s his work, that’s what he’s cut out for.  There ain’t nobody can do it but him, and to see him quit, to see him chuck up his chance to a third-rate ice-pilot like Duane—­a coastwise college professor that don’t know no more about Ice than—­than you do—­it regularly makes me sick.  Why, what will become of the captain now if he quits?  He’ll just settle down to an ordinary stay-at-home, write-in-a-book professor, and write articles for the papers and magazines, and bye-and-bye, maybe, he’ll get down to lecturing!  Just fancy, Miss, him, the captain, lecturing!  And while he stays at home and writes, and—­oh, Lord!—­lectures, somebody else, without a fifth of his ability, will do the work.  It’ll just naturally break my heart, it will!” exclaimed Adler, “if the captain chucks.  I wouldn’t be so main sorry that he won’t reach the Pole as that he quit trying—­as that a man like the captain—­or like what I thought he was—­gave up and chucked when he could win.”