“But, Adler,” returned Lloyd, “the captain—­Mr. Bennett, it seems to me, has done his share.  Think what he’s been through.  You can’t have forgotten the march to Kolyuchin Bay?”

But Adler made an impatient gesture with the hand that held the cap.  “The danger don’t figure; what he’d have to go through with don’t figure; the chances of life or death don’t figure; nothing in the world don’t figure. It’s his work; God A’mighty cut him out for that, and he’s got to do it.  Ain’t you got any influence with him, Miss?  Won’t you talk good talk to him?  Don’t let him chuck; don’t let him get soft.  Make him be a Man and not a professor.”

When Adler had left her Lloyd sank into a little seat at the edge of the garden walk, and let the flowers drop into her lap, and leaned back in her place, wide-eyed and thoughtful, reviewing in her imagination the events of the past few months.  What a change that summer had brought to both of them; how they had been shaped anew in the mould of circumstance!

Suddenly and without warning, they two, high-spirited, strong, determined, had clashed together, the man’s force against the woman’s strength; and the woman, inherently weaker, had been crushed and humbled.  For a time it seemed to her that she had been broken beyond hope; so humbled that she could never rise again; as though a great crisis had developed in her life, and that, having failed once, she must fail again, and again, and again—­as if her whole subsequent life must be one long failure.  But a greater crisis had followed hard upon the heels of the first—­the struggle with self, the greatest struggle of all.  Against the abstract principle of evil the woman who had failed in the material conflict with a masculine, masterful will, had succeeded, had conquered self, had been true when it was easy to be false, had dared the judgment of her peers so only that she might not deceive.

Her momentary, perhaps fancied, hatred of Bennett, who had so cruelly misunderstood and humiliated her, had apparently, of its own accord, departed from her heart.  Then had come the hour when the strange hazard of fortune had reversed their former positions, when she could be masterful while he was weak; when it was the man’s turn to be broken, to be prevailed against.  Her own discomfiture had been offset by his.  She no longer need look to him as her conqueror, her master.  And when she had seen him so weak, so pathetically unable to resist the lightest pressure of her hand; when it was given her not only to witness but to relieve his suffering, the great love for him that could not die had returned.  With the mastery of self had come the forgetfulness of self; and her profession, her life-work, of which she had been so proud, had seemed to her of small concern.  Now she was his, and his life was hers.  She should—­so she told herself—­be henceforward happy in his happiness, and her only pride would be the pride in his achievements.