The table was almost full; only two or three places besides her own were unoccupied.  There was Miss Bergyn at the head; the fever nurse, Miss Douglass, at her right, and, lower down, Lloyd saw Esther Thielman; Delia Craig, just back from a surgical case of Dr. Street’s; Miss Page, the oldest and most experienced nurse of them all; Gilbertson, whom every one called by her last name; Miss Ives and Eleanor Bogart, who had both taken doctors’ degrees, and could have practised if they had desired; Miss Wentworth, who had served an apprenticeship in a missionary hospital in Armenia, and had known Clara Barton, and, last of all, the newcomer, Miss Truslow, very young and very pretty, who had never yet had a case, and upon whose diploma the ink was hardly dry.

At first, so quietly had she entered, no one took any notice of Lloyd, and she stood a moment, her back to the door, wondering how she should begin.  Everybody seemed to be in the best of humour; a babel of talk was in the air; conversations were going forward, carried on across the table, or over intervening shoulders.

“Why, of course, don’t you see, that’s the very thing I meant—­”

“—­I think you can get that already sized, though, and with a stencil figure if you want it—­”

“—­Really, it’s very interesting; the first part is stupid, but she has some very good ideas.”

“—­Yes, at Vanoni’s.  But we get a reduction, you know—­”

“—­and, oh, listen; this is too funny; she turned around and said, very prim and stiff, ‘No, indeed; I’m too old a woman.’  Funny!  If I think of that on my deathbed I shall laugh—­”

“—­and so that settled it.  How could I go on after that—?”

“—­Must you tack it on?  The walls are so hard—­”

“Let Rownie do it; she knows.  Oh, here’s the invalid!”

“Oh, why, it’s Lloyd!  We’re so glad you’re able to come down!”

But when they had done exclaiming over her reappearance among them Lloyd still remained as she was, her back against the door, standing very straight, her hands at her side.  She did not immediately reply.  Heads were turned in her direction.  The talk fell away by rapid degrees as they began to notice the paleness of her face and the strange, firm set of her mouth.

“Sit down, Lloyd,” said Miss Bergyn; “don’t stand.  You are not very well yet; I’ll have Rownie bring you a glass of sherry.”

There was a silence.  Then at length: 

“No,” said Lloyd quietly.  “I don’t want any sherry.  I don’t want any supper.  I came down to tell you that you are all wrong in thinking I did what I could with my typhoid case at Medford.  You think I left only after the patient had died.  I did not; I left before.  There was a crisis of some kind.  I don’t know what it was, because I was not in the sick-room at the time, and I did not go when I was called.  The doctor was not there either; he had gone out and left the case in my charge.  There was nobody with the patient but a servant.  The servant called me, but I did not go.  Instead I came away and left the house.  The patient died that same day.  It is that that I wanted to tell you.  Do you all understand—­perfectly?  I left my patient at the moment of a crisis, and with no one with him but a servant.  And he died that same afternoon.”