Lloyd took in the room at a glance—­the closely drawn curtains, the screen between the bed and the windows, the doctor standing on the hearth-rug, and the fever-inflamed face of the patient on the pillow.  Then all her power of self-repression could not keep her from uttering a smothered exclamation.

For she, the woman who, with all the savage energy of him, Bennett loved, had, at peril of her life, come to nurse Bennett’s nearest friend, the man of all others dear to him—­Richard Ferriss.

VI.

Two days after Dr. Pitts had brought Ferriss to his country house in the outskirts of Medford he had been able to diagnose his sickness as typhoid fever, and at once had set about telegraphing the fact to Bennett.  Then it had occurred to him that he did not know where Bennett had gone.  Bennett had omitted notifying him of his present whereabouts, and, acting upon Dr. Pitts’ advice, had hidden himself away from everybody.  Neither at his club nor at his hotel, where his mail accumulated in extraordinary quantities, had any forwarding address been left.  Bennett would not even know that Ferriss had been moved to Medford.  So much the worse.  It could not be helped.  There was nothing for the doctor to do but to leave Bennett in ignorance and go ahead and fight for the life of Ferriss as best he could.  Pitts arranged for a brother physician to take over his practice, and devoted himself entirely to Ferriss.  And Ferriss sickened and sickened, and went steadily from bad to worse.  The fever advanced regularly to a certain stage, a stage of imminent danger, and there paused.  Rarely had Pitts been called upon to fight a more virulent form of the disease.

What made matters worse was that Ferriss hung on for so long a time without change one way or another.  Pitts had long since been convinced of ulceration in the membrane of the intestines, but it astonished him that this symptom persisted so long without signs either of progressing or diminishing.  The course of the disease was unusually slow.  The first nurse had already had time to sicken and die; a second had been infected, and yet Ferriss “hung on,” neither sinking nor improving, yet at every hour lying perilously near death.  It was not often that death and life locked horns for so long, not often that the chance was so even.  Many was the hour, many was the moment, when a hair would have turned the balance, and yet the balance was preserved.

At her abrupt recognition of Ferriss, in this patient whom she had been summoned to nurse, and whose hold upon life was so pitifully weak, Lloyd’s heart gave a great leap and then sank ominously in her breast.  Her first emotion was one of boundless self-reproach.  Why had she not known of this?  Why had she not questioned Bennett more closely as to his friend’s sickness?  Might she not have expected something like this?  Was not typhoid the one evil to be feared and foreseen after experiences such as Ferriss had undergone—­the fatigue and privations of the march over the ice, and the subsequent months aboard the steam whaler, with its bad food, its dirt, and its inevitable overcrowding?