“It’s all in the ship.  Build a ship strong enough to withstand lateral pressure of the ice and the whole thing becomes easy.”

Lloyd yawned and stirred her tea indifferently as she answered: 

“Yes, but you know that can’t be done.”

Bennett frowned thoughtfully, drumming upon the table.

“I’ll wager I could build one.”

“But it’s not the ship alone.  It’s the man.  Whom would you get to command your ship?”

Bennett stared.

“Why, I would take her, of course.”

“You?  You have had your share—­your chance.  Now you can afford to stay home and finish your book—­and—­well, you might deliver lectures.”

“What rot, Lloyd!  Can you see me posing on a lecture platform?”

“I would rather see you doing that than trying to beat Duane, than getting into the ice again.  I would rather see you doing that than to know that you were away up there—­in the north, in the ice, at your work again, fighting your way toward the Pole, leading your men and overcoming every obstacle that stood in your way, never giving up, never losing heart, trying to do the great, splendid, impossible thing; risking your life to reach merely a point on a chart.  Yes, I would rather see you on a lecture platform than on the deck of an arctic steamship.  You know that, Ward.”

He shot a glance at her.

“I would like to know what you mean,” he muttered.

The winter went by, then the spring, and by June all the country around Medford was royal with summer.  During the last days of May, Bennett practically had completed the body of his book and now occupied himself with its appendix.  There was little variation in their daily life.  Adler became more and more of a fixture about the place.  In the first week of June, Lloyd and Bennett had a visitor, a guest; this was Hattie Campbell.  Mr. Campbell was away upon a business trip, and Lloyd had arranged to have the little girl spend the fortnight of his absence with her at Medford.

The summer was delightful.  A vast, pervading warmth lay close over all the world.  The trees, the orchards, the rose-bushes in the garden about the house, all the teeming life of trees and plants hung motionless and poised in the still, tideless ocean of the air.  It was very quiet; all distant noises, the crowing of cocks, the persistent calling of robins and jays, the sound of wheels upon the road, the rumble of the trains passing the station down in the town, seemed muffled and subdued.  The long, calm summer days succeeded one another in an unbroken, glimmering procession.  From dawn to twilight one heard the faint, innumerable murmurs of the summer, the dull bourdon of bees in the rose and lilac bushes, the prolonged, strident buzzing of blue-bottle-flies, the harsh, dry scrape of grasshoppers, the stridulating of an occasional cricket.  In the twilight and all through the night itself the frogs shrilled from the hedgerows and in the damp, north