mbre crimson of her cheeks had suddenly given place to an unwonted
paleness; even her dull-blue eyes, that so rarely sparkled, were all
alight. She straightened herself.

"Very well, then," she answered quietly, "our conversation can stop
where it is. You will excuse me, Mr. Bennett, if I leave you. I have my
work to do."

Bennett was standing between her and the door. He did not move. Very
gravely he said:

"Don't. Please don't bring it--to that."

Lloyd flashed a look at him, her eyes wide, exclaiming:

"You don't mean--you don't dare--"

"I tell you again that I mean to carry my point."

"And I tell you that I shall _not_ leave my patient."

Bennett met her glance for an instant, and, holding her gaze with his,
answered but two words. Speaking in a low voice and with measured
slowness, he said:

"You--shall."

There was a silence. The two stood there, looking straight into one
another's eyes, their mutual opposition at its climax. The seconds began
to pass. The conflict between the man's aggression and the woman's
resistance reached its turning point. Before another word should be
spoken, before the minute should pass, one of the two must give ground.

And then it was that Lloyd felt something breakdown within her,
something to which she could not put a name. A mysterious element of her
character, hitherto rigid and intact, was beginning at last to crumble.
Somewhere a breach had been opened; somewhere the barrier had been
undermined. The fine steadfastness that was hers, and that she had so
dearly prized, her strength in which she had gloried, her independence,
her splendid arrogant self-confidence and conscious power seemed all at
once to weaken before this iron resolve that shut its ears and eyes,
this colossal, untutored, savage intensity of purpose.

And abruptly her eyes were opened, and the inherent weakness of her sex
became apparent to her. Was it a mistake, then? Could not a woman be
strong? Was her strength grafted upon elemental weakness--not her
individual weakness, but the weakness of her sex, the intended natural
weakness of the woman? Had she built her fancied impregnable fortress
upon sand?

But habit was too strong. For an instant, brief as the opening and
shutting of an eye, a vision was vouchsafed to her, one of those swift
glimpses into unplumbed depths that come sometimes to the human mind in
the moments of its exaltation, but that are gone with such rapidity that
they may not b