But the man, though all unwittingly, radiated gloom.  Lloyd readily saw that Adler was labouring under a certain cloud of disappointment and deferred hope.  Naturally she understood the cause.  Lloyd was too large-hearted to feel any irritation at the sight of Adler.  But she could not regard him with indifference.  To her mind he stood for all that Bennett had given up, for the great career that had stopped half-way, for the work half done, the task only half completed.  In a way was not Adler now superior to Bennett?  His one thought and aim and hope was to “try again.”  His ambition was yet alive and alight; the soldier was willing where the chief lost heart.  Never again had Adler addressed himself to Lloyd on the subject of Bennett’s inactivity.  Now he seemed to understand—­to realise that once married—­and to Lloyd—­he must no longer expect Bennett to continue the work.  All this Lloyd interpreted from Adler’s attitude, and again and again told herself that she could read the man’s thoughts aright.  She even fancied she caught a mute appeal in his eyes upon those rare occasions when they met, as though he looked to her as the only hope, the only means to wake Bennett from his lethargy.  She imagined that she heard him say: 

“Ain’t you got any influence with him, Miss?  Won’t you talk good talk to him?  Don’t let him chuck.  Make him be a man, and not a professor.  Nothing else 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.”

His work, his work, God made him for that; appointed the task, made the man, and now she came between.  God, Man, and the Work,—­the three vast elements of an entire system, the whole universe epitomised in the tremendous trinity.  Again and again such thoughts assailed her.  Duty once more stirred and awoke.  It seemed to her as if some great engine ordained of Heaven to run its appointed course had come to a standstill, was rusting to its ruin, and that she alone of all the world had power to grasp its lever, to send it on its way; whither, she did not know; why, she could not tell.  She knew only that it was right that she should act.  By degrees her resolution hardened.  Bennett must try again.  But at first it seemed to her as though her heart would break, and more than once she wavered.

As Bennett continued to dictate to her the story of the expedition he arrived at the account of the march toward Kolyuchin Bay, and, finally, at the description of the last week, with its terrors, its sufferings, its starvation, its despair, when, one by one, the men died in their sleeping-bags, to be buried under slabs of ice.  When this point in the narrative was reached Bennett inserted no comment of his own; but while Lloyd wrote, read simply and with grim directness from the entries in his journal precisely as they had been written.

Lloyd had known in a vague way that the expedition had suffered abominably, but hitherto Bennett had never consented to tell her the story in detail.  “It was a hard week,” he informed her, “a rather bad grind.”