But she must go to the house.  It was inevitable.  She went forward, as it were, step by step.  That little journey across the square under the elms and cottonwoods was for her a veritable chemin de la croix.  Every step was an agony; every yard covered only brought her nearer the time and place of exposure.  It was all the more humiliating because she knew that her impelling motive was not one of duty.  There was nothing lofty in the matter—­nothing self-sacrificing.  She went back because she had to go back.  Little material necessities, almost ludicrous in their pettiness, forced her on.

As she came nearer she looked cautiously at the windows of the agency.  Who would be the first to note her home-coming?  Would it be Miss Douglass, or Esther Thielman, or Miss Bergyn, the superintendent nurse?  What would first be said to her?  With what words would she respond?  Then how the news of the betrayal of her trust would flash from room to room!  How it would be discussed, how condemned, how deplored!  Not one of the nurses of that little band but would not feel herself hurt by what she had done—­by what she had been forced to do.  And the news of her failure would spread to all her acquaintances and friends throughout the City.  Dr. Street would know it; every physician to whom she had hitherto been so welcome an aid would know it.  In all the hospitals it would be a nine days’ gossip.  Campbell would hear of it, and Hattie.

All at once, within thirty feet of the house, Lloyd turned about and walked rapidly away from it.  The movement was all but involuntary; every instinct in her, every sense of shame, brusquely revolted.  It was stronger than she.  A power, for the moment irresistible, dragged her back from that doorway.  Once entering here, she left all hope behind.  Yet the threshold must be crossed, yet the hope must be abandoned.

She felt that if she faced about now a second time she would indeed attract attention.  So, while her cheeks flamed hot at the meanness, the miserable ridiculousness of the imposture, she assumed a brisk, determined gait, as though she knew just where she were going, and, turning out of the square down a by-street, walked around the block, even stopping once or twice before a store, pretending an interest in the display.  It seemed to her that by now everybody in the streets must have noted that there was something wrong with her.  Twice as a passer-by brushed past her she looked back to see if he was watching her.  How to live through the next ten minutes?  If she were only in her room, bolted in, locked and double-locked in.  Why was there not some back way through which she could creep to that seclusion?

And so it was that Lloyd came back to the house she had built, to the little community she had so proudly organised, to the agency she had founded, and with her own money endowed and supported.