“Where’s Adler?” asked Ferriss.

“He’s away after shrimps,” responded Bennett.

Bennett’s eyes returned to his journal and rested on the open page thoughtfully.

“Do you know what I’ve just written here, Ferriss?” he asked, adding without waiting for an answer:  “I’ve written ’It’s the end of everything.’”

“I suppose it is,” admitted Ferriss, looking about the tent.

“Yes, the end of everything.  It’s come—­at last....  Well.”  There was a long silence.  One of the men in the sleeping-bags groaned and turned upon his face.  Outside the wind lapsed suddenly to a prolonged sigh of infinite sadness, clamouring again upon the instant.

“Dick,” said Bennett, returning his journal to the box of records, “it is the end of everything, and just because it is I want to talk to you—­to ask you something.”

Ferriss came nearer.  The horrid shouting of the wind deadened the sound of their voices; the others could not hear, and by now it would have mattered very little to any of them if they had.

“Dick,” began Bennett, “nothing makes much difference now.  In a few hours we shall all be like Dennison here;” he tapped the body of the doctor, who had died during the night.  It was already frozen so hard that his touch upon it resounded as if it had been a log of wood.  “We shall be like this pretty soon.  But before—­well, while I can, I want to ask you something about Lloyd Searight.  You’ve known her all your life, and you saw her later than I did before we left.  You remember I had to come to the ship two days before you, about the bilge pumps.”

While Bennett had been speaking Ferriss had been sitting very erect upon his sleeping-bag, drawing figures and vague patterns in the fur of his deer-skin coat with the tip of the tin spoon.  Yes, Bennett was right; he, Ferriss, had known her all his life, and it was no doubt because of this very fact that she had come to be so dear to him.  But he had not always known it, had never discovered his love for her until the time was at hand to say good-bye, to leave her for this mad dash for the Pole.  It had been too late to speak then, and Ferriss had never told her.  She was never to know that he too—­like Bennett—­cared.

“It seems rather foolish,” continued Bennett clumsily, “but if I thought she had ever cared for me—­in that way—­why, it would make this that is coming to us seem—­I don’t know—­easier to be borne perhaps.  I say it very badly, but it would not be so hard to die if I thought she had ever loved me—­a bit.”

Ferriss was thinking very fast.  Why was it he had never guessed something like this?  But in Ferriss’s mind the idea of the love of a woman had never associated itself with Bennett, that great, harsh man of colossal frame, so absorbed in his huge projects, so welded to his single aim, furthering his purposes to the exclusion of every other thought, desire, or emotion.  Bennett was a man’s man.  But here Ferriss checked himself.  Bennett himself had called her a man’s woman, a grand, splendid man’s woman.  He was right; he was right.  She was no less than that; small wonder, after all, that Bennett had been attracted to her.  What a pair they were, strong, masterful both, insolent in the consciousness of their power!