re Bennett
had gone. Bennett had omitted notifying him of his present whereabouts,
and, acting upon Dr. Pitts' advice, had hidden himself away from
everybody. Neither at his club nor at his hotel, where his mail
accumulated in extraordinary quantities, had any forwarding address been
left. Bennett would not even know that Ferriss had been moved to
Medford. So much the worse. It could not be helped. There was nothing
for the doctor to do but to leave Bennett in ignorance and go ahead and
fight for the life of Ferriss as best he could. Pitts arranged for a
brother physician to take over his practice, and devoted himself
entirely to Ferriss. And Ferriss sickened and sickened, and went
steadily from bad to worse. The fever advanced regularly to a certain
stage, a stage of imminent danger, and there paused. Rarely had Pitts
been called upon to fight a more virulent form of the disease.

What made matters worse was that Ferriss hung on for so long a time
without change one way or another. Pitts had long since been convinced
of ulceration in the membrane of the intestines, but it astonished him
that this symptom persisted so long without signs either of progressing
or diminishing. The course of the disease was unusually slow. The first
nurse had already had time to sicken and die; a second had been
infected, and yet Ferriss "hung on," neither sinking nor improving, yet
at every hour lying perilously near death. It was not often that death
and life locked horns for so long, not often that the chance was so
even. Many was the hour, many was the moment, when a hair would have
turned the balance, and yet the balance was preserved.

At her abrupt recognition of Ferriss, in this patient whom she had been
summoned to nurse, and whose hold upon life was so pitifully weak,
Lloyd's heart gave a great leap and then sank ominously in her breast.
Her first emotion was one of boundless self-reproach. Why had she not
known of this? Why had she not questioned Bennett more closely as to his
friend's sickness? Might she not have expected something like this? Was
not typhoid the one evil to be feared and foreseen after experiences
such as Ferriss had undergone--the fatigue and privations of the march
over the ice, and the subsequent months aboard the steam whaler, with
its bad food, its dirt, and its inevitable overcrowding?

And while she had been idling in the country, this man, whom she had
known since her girlhood better and longer than an