It was quite true.  Bennett wrote with amazing rapidity and with ragged, vigorous strokes of the pen, not unfrequently driving the point through the paper itself; his script was pothooks, clumsy, slanting in all directions, all but illegible.  In the end Lloyd had almost pushed him from his place at the desk, taking the pen from between his fingers, exclaiming: 

“Get up!  Give me your chair—­and that pen.  Handwriting like that is nothing else but a sin.”

Bennett allowed her to bully him, protesting merely for the enjoyment of squabbling with her.

“Come, I like this.  What are you doing in my workroom anyhow, Mrs. Bennett?  I think you had better go to your housework.”

“Don’t talk,” she answered.  “Here are your notes and journal.  Now tell me what to write.”

In the end matters adjusted themselves.  Daily Lloyd took her place at the desk, pen in hand, the sleeve of her right arm rolled back to the elbow (a habit of hers whenever writing, and which Bennett found to be charming beyond words), her pen travelling steadily from line to line.  He on his part paced the floor, a cigar between his teeth, his notes and note-books in his hand, dictating comments of his own, or quoting from the pages, stained, frayed, and crumpled, written by the light of the auroras, the midnight suns, or the unsteady, flickering of train-oil lanterns and blubber-lamps.

What long, delicious hours they spent thus, as the winter drew on, in the absolute quiet of that country house, ignored and lost in the brown, bare fields and leafless orchards of the open country!  No one troubled them.  No one came near them.  They asked nothing better than that the world wherein they once had lived, whose hurtling activity and febrile unrest they both had known so well, should leave them alone.

Only one jarring note, and that none too resonant, broke the long harmony of Lloyd’s happiness during these days.  Bennett was deaf to it; but for Lloyd it vibrated continuously and, as time passed, with increasing insistence and distinctness.  But for one person in the world Lloyd could have told herself that her life was without a single element of discontent.

This was Adler.  It was not that his presence about the house was a reproach to Bennett’s wife, for the man was scrupulously unobtrusive.  He had the instinctive delicacy that one sometimes discovers in simple, undeveloped natures—­seafaring folk especially—­and though he could not bring himself to leave his former chief, he had withdrawn himself more than ever from notice since the time of Bennett’s marriage.  He rarely even waited on the table these days, for Lloyd and Bennett often chose to breakfast and dine quite to themselves.

But, for all that, Lloyd saw Adler from time to time, Kamiska invariably at his heels.  She came upon him polishing the brasses upon the door of the house, or binding strips of burlaps and sacking about the rose-bushes in the garden, or returning from the village post-office with the mail, invariably wearing the same woollen cap, the old pea-jacket, and the jersey with the name “Freja” upon the breast.  He rarely spoke to her unless she first addressed him, and then always with a precise salute, bringing his heels sharply together, standing stiffly at attention.