“What’s that?” demanded Bennett with a sudden frown.

“If I leave Mr. Ferriss now, if he is left alone here for so much as half an hour, I will not answer—­”

“Ferriss!  What are you talking about?  What is your patient’s name?”

“Didn’t you know?”

“Ferriss!  Dick Ferriss!  Don’t tell me it’s Dick Ferriss.”

“I thought all the time you knew—­that you had heard.  Yes, it is Mr. Ferriss.”

“Is he very sick?  What is he doing out here?  No, I had not heard; nobody told me.  Pitts was to write—­to—­to wire.  Will he pull through?  What’s the matter with him?  Is it he who had typhoid?”

“He is very dangerously ill.  Dr. Pitts brought him here.  This is his house.  We do not know if he will get well.  It is only by watching him every instant that we can hope for anything.  At this moment there is no one with him but a servant. Now, Mr. Bennett, am I to go to my patient?”

“But—­but—­we can get some one else.”

“Not before three hours, and it’s only the truth when I tell you he may die at any minute.  Am I to go?”

In a second of time the hideous situation leaped up before Bennett’s eyes.  Right or wrong, the conviction that Lloyd was terribly imperilling her life by remaining at her patient’s bedside had sunk into his mind and was not to be eradicated.  It was a terror that had gripped him close and that could not be reasoned away.  But Ferriss?  What of him?  Now it had brusquely transpired that his life, too, hung in the balance.  How to decide?  How to meet this abominable complication wherein he must sacrifice the woman he so dearly loved or the man who was the Damon to his Pythias, the Jonathan to his David?

“Am I to go?” repeated Lloyd for the third time.

Bennett closed his eyes, clasping his head with both hands.

“Great God, wait—­wait—­I can’t think—­I—­I, oh, this is terrible!”

Lloyd drove home her advantage mercilessly.

“Wait?  I tell you we can’t wait.”

Then Bennett realised with a great spasm of horror that for him there was no going back.  All his life, accustomed to quick decisions in moments of supreme peril, he took his decision now, facing, with such courage as he could muster, its unspeakable consequences, consequences that he knew must harry and hound him all the rest of his life.  Whichever way he decided, he opened his heart to the beak and talons of a pitiless remorse.  He could no longer see, in the dreadful confusion of his mind, the right of things or the wrong of things, could not accurately weigh chances or possibilities.  For him only two alternatives presented themselves, the death of Ferriss or the death of Lloyd.  He could see no compromise, could imagine no escape.  It was as though a headsman with ready axe stood at his elbow, awaiting his commands.  And, besides all this, he had long since passed the limit—­though perhaps he did not know it