r than that of any of her former
patients? She could not say; she avoided answering the question.
Certainly her heart beat no faster at this moment to know that he was in
the grip of a perilous disease. She told herself that her Bennett was
dead already; that she was coming back to Medford not to care for and
watch over the individual, but to combat the disease.

When she arrived at the doctor's house in Medford, a strange-looking man
opened the door for her, and asked immediately if she was the nurse.

"Yes," said Lloyd, "I am. Is Dr. Pitts here?"

"Upstairs in his room," answered the other in a whisper, closing the
front door with infinite softness. "He won't let me go in, the doctor
won't; I--I ain't seen him in four days. Ask the doctor if I can't just
have a blink at him--just a little blink through the crack of the door.
Just think, Miss, I ain't seen him in four days! Just think of that! And
look here, they ain't giving him enough to eat--nothing but milk and
chicken soup with rice in it. He never did like rice; that's no kind of
rations for a sick man. I fixed him up a bit of duff yesterday, what he
used to like so much aboard ship, and Pitts wouldn't let him have it. He
regularly laughed in my face."

Lloyd sent word to the doctor by the housekeeper that she had arrived,
and on going up found Pitts waiting for her at the door of the
sick-room, not that which had been occupied by Ferriss, but another--the
guest-chamber of the house, situated toward the rear of the building.

"Why, I expected Miss Douglass!" exclaimed the doctor in a low voice as
soon as his eye fell upon Lloyd. "Any one of them but you!"

"I had to come," Lloyd answered quietly, flushing hotly for all that.
"It was my turn, and it was not right for me to stay away."

The doctor hesitated an instant, and then dismissed the subject, putting
his chin in the air as if to say that, after all, it was not his affair.

"Well," he said, "it's queer to see how things will tangle themselves
sometimes. I don't know whether he took this thing from Ferriss or not.
Both of them were exposed to the same conditions when their expedition
went to pieces and they were taken off by the whaling ships--bad water,
weakened constitution, not much power of resistance; in prime condition
for the bacillus, and the same cause might have produced the same
effect; at any rate, he's in a bad way."

"Is he--very bad?" asked Lloyd.

"Well, he's not the hang-on sort tha