For a time Lloyd was supremely happy.  Their life was unbroken, uneventful.  The calm, monotonous days of undisturbed happiness to which she had looked forward were come at last.  Thus it was always to be.  Isolated and apart, she could shut her ears to the thunder of the world’s great tide that somewhere, off beyond the hills in the direction of the City, went swirling through its channels.  Hardly an hour went by that she and Bennett were not together.  Lloyd had transferred her stable to her new home; Lewis was added to the number of their servants, and until Bennett’s old-time vigour completely returned to him she drove out almost daily with her husband, covering the country for miles around.

Much of their time, however, they spent in Bennett’s study.  This was a great apartment in the rear of the house, scantily, almost meanly, furnished.  Papers littered the floor; bundles of manuscripts, lists, charts, and observations, the worn and battered tin box of records, note-books, journals, tables of logarithms were piled upon Bennett’s desk.  A bookcase crammed with volumes of reference, statistical pamphlets, and the like stood between the windows, while one of the walls was nearly entirely occupied by a vast map of the arctic circle, upon which the course of the Freja, her drift in the pack, and the route of the expedition’s southerly march were accurately plotted.

The room was bare of ornament; the desk and a couple of chairs were its only furniture.  Pictures there were none.  Their places were taken by photographs and a great blue print of the shipbuilder’s plans and specifications of the Freja.

The photographs were some of those that Dennison had made of the expedition—­the Freja nipped in the ice, a group of the officers and crew upon the forward deck, the coast of Wrangel Island, Cape Kammeni, peculiar ice formations, views of the pack under different conditions and temperatures, pressure-ridges and scenes of the expedition’s daily life in the arctic, bear-hunts, the manufacture of sledges, dog-teams, Bennett taking soundings and reading the wind-gauge, and one, the last view of the Freja, taken just as the ship—­her ice-sheathed dripping bows heaved high in the air, the flag still at the peak—­sank from sight.

However, on the wall over the blue-print plans of the Freja, one of the boat’s flags, that had been used by the expedition throughout all the time of its stay in the ice, hung suspended—­a faded, tattered square of stars and bars.

As the new life settled quietly and evenly to its grooves a routine began to develop.  About an hour after breakfast Lloyd and Bennett shut themselves in Bennett’s “workroom,” as he called it, Lloyd taking her place at the desk.  She had become his amanuensis, had insisted upon writing to his dictation.

“Look at that manuscript,” she had exclaimed one day, turning the sheets that Bennett had written; “literally the very worst handwriting I have ever seen.  What do you suppose a printer would make out of your ‘thes’ and ‘ands’?  It’s hieroglyphics, you know,” she informed him gravely, nodding her head at him.