eeth and fists tight shut
he kept muttering to himself: "She may die, she may die--we--we may
never see her again." Then suddenly came the fear, the sickening sink of
heart, the choke at the throat, first the tightening and then the sudden
relaxing of all the nerves. Lashed and harried by the sense of a fearful
calamity, an unspeakable grief that was pursuing after him, Bennett did
not stop to think, to reflect. He chose instantly to believe that Lloyd
was near her death, and once the idea was fixed in his brain it was not
thereafter to be reasoned away. Suddenly, at a turn in the road, he
stopped, his hands deep in his pockets, his bootheel digging into the
ground. "Now, then," he exclaimed, "what's to be done?"

Just one thing: Lloyd must leave the case at once, that very day if it
were possible. He must save her; must turn her back from this
destruction toward which she was rushing, impelled by such a foolish,
mistaken notion of duty.

"Yes," he said, "there's just that to be done, and, by God! it shall be
done."

But would Lloyd be turned back from a course she had chosen for herself?
Could he persuade her? Then with this thought of possible opposition
Bennett's resolve all at once tightened to the sticking point. Never in
the darkest hours of his struggle with the arctic ice had his
determination grown so fierce; never had his resolution so girded
itself, so nerved itself to crush down resistance. The force of his will
seemed brusquely to be quadrupled and decupled. He would do as he
desired; come what might he would gain his end. He would stop at
nothing, hesitate at nothing. It would probably be difficult to get her
from her post, but with all his giant's strength Bennett set himself to
gain her safety.

A great point that he believed was in his favour, a consideration that
influenced him to adopt so irrevocable a resolution, was his belief that
Lloyd loved him. Bennett was not a woman's man. Men he could understand
and handle like so many manikins, but the nature of his life and work
did not conduce to a knowledge of women. Bennett did not understand
them. In his interview with Lloyd when she had so strenuously denied
Ferriss' story Bennett could not catch the ring of truth. It had gotten
into his mind that Lloyd loved him. He believed easily what he wanted to
believe, and his faith in Lloyd's love for him had become a part and
parcel of his fundamental idea of things, not readily to be driven out
even by L