“Oh,” exclaimed Hattie, delighted, “do you know Miss Searight?  She was my nurse when I was so sick—­because you know I had hip disease and there was an operation.  No, she’s not here any more.  She’s gone away, gone back to the City.”

“Gone back to the City?”

“Yes, three or four days ago.  But I’m going to write to her this afternoon.  Shall I say who called?” Then, without waiting for a reply, she added, “I guess I had better introduce myself.  My name is Harriet Campbell, and my papa is Craig V. Campbell, of the Hercules Wrought Steel Company in the City.  Won’t you have a chair?”

The little convalescent and the arctic explorer shook hands with great solemnity.

“I’m so pleased to meet you,” said Bennett.  “I haven’t a card, but my name is Ward Bennett—­of the Freja expedition,” he added.  But, to his relief, the little girl had not heard of him.

“Very well,” she said, “I’ll tell Miss Searight Mr. Bennett called.”

“No,” he replied, hesitatingly, “no, you needn’t do that.”

“Why, she won’t answer my letter, you know,” explained Hattie, “because she is afraid her letters would give me typhoid fever, that they might”—­she continued carefully, hazarding a remembered phrase—­“carry the contagion.  You see she has gone to nurse a dreadful case of typhoid fever out at Medford, near the City, and we’re so worried and anxious about her—­papa and I. One nurse that had this case has died already and another one has caught the disease and is very sick, and Miss Searight, though she knew just how dangerous it was, would go, just like—­like—­” Hattie hesitated, then confused memories of her school reader coming to her, finished with “like Casabianca.”

“Oh,” said Bennett, turning his head so as to fix her with his own good eye.  “She has gone to nurse a typhoid fever patient, has she?”

“Yes, and papa told me—­” and Hattie became suddenly very grave, “that we might—­might—­oh, dear—­never see her again.”

“Hum!  Whereabouts is this place in Medford?  She gave you her address; what is it?” Hattie told him, and he took himself abruptly away.

Bennett had gone some little distance down the road before the real shock came upon him.  Lloyd was in a position of imminent peril; her life was in the issue.  With blind, unreasoned directness he leaped at once to this conclusion, and as he strode along with teeth and fists tight shut he kept muttering to himself:  “She may die, she may die—­we—­we may never see her again.”  Then suddenly came the fear, the sickening sink of heart, the choke at the throat, first the tightening and then the sudden relaxing of all the nerves.  Lashed and harried by the sense of a fearful calamity, an unspeakable grief that was pursuing after him, Bennett did not stop to think, to reflect.  He chose instantly to believe that Lloyd was near her death, and once the idea was fixed in his brain it was not thereafter to be reasoned away.  Suddenly, at a turn in the road, he stopped, his hands deep in his pockets, his bootheel digging into the ground.  “Now, then,” he exclaimed, “what’s to be done?”