press of the City where Bennett and
Ferriss both had their homes published and republished and published
again and again. News of the men, their whereabouts and intentions,
invaded the sick-room--where Lloyd watched over the convalescence of her
little patient--by the very chinks of the windows.

Lloyd learned how the ship had been "nipped;" how, after inconceivable
toil, the members of the expedition had gained the land; how they had
marched southward toward the Chuckch settlements; how, at the eleventh
hour, the survivors, exhausted and starving, had been rescued by the
steam whalers; how these whalers themselves had been caught in the ice,
and how the survivors of the Freja had been obliged to spend another
winter in the Arctic. She learned the details of their final return. In
the quiet, darkened room where Hattie lay she heard from without the
echo of the thunder of the nations; she saw how the figure of Bennett
towered suddenly magnificent in the world; how that the people were
brusquely made aware of a new hero. She learned that honours came
thronging about him unsought; that the King of the Belgians had
conferred a decoration upon him; that the geographical societies of
continental Europe had elected him to honourary membership; that the
President and the Secretary of War had sent telegrams of
congratulations.

"And what does he do," she murmured, "the first of all upon his return?
Asks to see me--me!"

She sent an answer to his note by the same boy who brought it, naming
the following afternoon, explaining that two days later she expected to
go into the country to a little town called Bannister to take her annual
fortnight's vacation.

"But what of--of the other?" she murmured as she stood at the window of
her room watching the messenger boy bicycling across the square. "Why
does not he--he, too--?"

She put her chin in the air and turned about, looking abstractedly at
the rugs on the parquetry.

Lloyd's vacation had really begun two days before. Her name was off the
roster of the house, and till the end of the month her time was her own.
The afternoon was hot and very still. Even in the cool, stone-built
agency, with its windows wide and heavily shaded with awnings, the heat
was oppressive. For a long time Lloyd had been shut away from fresh air
and the sun, and now she suddenly decided to drive out in the City's
park. She rang up her stable and ordered Lewis to put her ponies to her
phaeton.

She s