Now she must enter that house, now she must face its inmates, her companions.  What to say to them?  How explain her defection?  How tell them that she had not left her post of her own will?  Lloyd fancied herself saying in substance that the man who loved her and whom she loved had made her abandon her patient.  She set her teeth.  No, not that confession of miserable weakness; not that of all things.  And yet the other alternative, what was that?  It could be only that she had been afraid—­she, Lloyd Searight!  Must she, who had been the bravest of them all, stand before that little band of devoted women in the light of a self-confessed coward?

She remembered the case of the young English woman, Harriet Freeze, who, when called upon to nurse a smallpox patient, had been found wanting in courage at the crucial moment, and had discovered an excuse for leaving her post.  Miss Freeze had been expelled dishonourably from the midst of her companions.  And now she, Lloyd, standing apparently convicted of the same dishonour, must face the same tribunal.  There was no escape.  She must enter that house, she must endure that ordeal, and this at precisely the time when her resolution had been shattered, her will broken, her courage daunted.  For a moment the idea of flight suggested itself to her—­she would avoid the issue.  She would hide from reproach and contumely, and without further explanation go back to her place in the country at Bannister.  But the little exigencies of her position made this impossible.  Besides her nurse’s bag, her satchel was the only baggage she had at that moment, and she knew that there was but little money in her purse.

All at once she realised that while debating the question she had been sitting on one of the benches under the trees in the square.  The sun was setting; evening was coming on.  Maybe if she waited until six o’clock she could enter the house while the other nurses were at supper, gain her room unobserved, then lock herself in and deny herself to all callers.  But Lloyd made a weary, resigned movement of her shoulders.  Sooner or later she must meet them all eye to eye.  It would be only putting off the humiliation.

She rose, and, turning to the house, began to walk slowly toward it.  Why put it off?  It would be as hard at one time as another.  But so great was her sense of shame that even as she walked she fancied that the very passers-by, the loungers on the benches around the fountain, must know that here was a disgraced woman.  Was it not apparent in her very face, in the very uncertainty of her gait?  She told herself she had not done wisely to sit even for a moment upon the bench she had just quitted.  She wondered if she had been observed, and furtively glanced about her.  There!  Was not that nursemaid studying her too narrowly?  And the policeman close at hand, was he not watching her quizzically?  She quickened her gait, moved with a sudden impulse to get out of sight, to hide within doors—­where?  In the house?  There where, so soon as she set foot in it, her companions, the other nurses, must know her dishonour?  Where was she to go?  Where to turn?  What was to become of her?