At last she found herself at the bottom of the steps, her foot upon the lowest one, her hand clasping the heavy bronze rail.  There was no going back now.  She went up and pushed the button of the electric bell, and then, the step once taken, the irrevocable once dared, something like the calmness of resignation came to her.  There was no help for it.  Now for the ordeal.  Rownie opened the door for her with a cheery welcome.  Lloyd was dimly conscious that the girl said something about her mail, and that she was just in time for supper.  But the hall and stairway were deserted and empty, while from the dining-room came a subdued murmur of conversation and the clink of dishes.  The nurses were at supper, as Lloyd had hoped.  The moment favoured her, and she brushed by Rownie, and almost ran, panic-stricken and trembling, up the stairs.

She gained the hall of the second floor.  There was the door of her room standing ajar.  With a little gasp of infinite relief, she hurried to it, entered, shut and locked and bolted it behind her, and, casting her satchel and handbag from her, flung herself down upon the great couch, and buried her head deep among the cushions.

At Lloyd’s abrupt entrance Miss Douglass turned about from the book-shelves in an angle of the room and stared a moment in no little surprise.  Then she exclaimed: 

“Why, Lloyd, why, what is it—­what is the matter?”

Lloyd sprang up sharply at the sound of her voice, and then sank down to a sitting posture upon the edge of the couch.  Quietly enough she said: 

“Oh, is it you?  I didn’t know—­expect to find any one—­”

“You don’t mind, do you?  I just ran in to get a book—­something to read.  I’ve had a headache all day, and didn’t go down to supper.”

Lloyd nodded.  “Of course—­I don’t mind,” she said, a little wearily.

“But tell me,” continued the fever nurse, “whatever is the matter?  When you came in just now—­I never saw you so—­oh, I understand, your case at Medford—­”

Lloyd’s hands closed tight upon the edge of the couch.

“No one could have got a patient through when the fever had got as far as that,” continued the other.  “This must have been the fifth or sixth week.  The second telegram came just in time to prevent my going.  I was just going out of the door when the boy came with it.”

“You?  What telegram?” inquired Lloyd.

“Yes, I was on call.  The first despatch asking for another extra nurse came about two o’clock.  The four-twenty was the first train I could have taken—­the two-forty-five express is a through train and don’t stop at Medford—­and, as I say, I was just going out of the door when Dr. Pitts’s second despatch came, countermanding the first, and telling us that the patient had died.  It seems that it was one of the officers of the Freja expedition.  We didn’t know—­”

“Died?” interrupted Lloyd, looking fixedly at her.