but, Lloyd, listen. I know how you must dislike me now,
but will you please go--go, go at once!"

"No."

What a strange spinning of the wheel of fate was here! In so short a
time had their mutual positions been reversed. Now it was she who was
strong and he who was weak. It was she who conquered and he who was
subdued. It was she who triumphed and he who was humiliated. It was he
who implored and she who denied. It was her will and no longer his that
must issue victorious from the struggle.

And how complete now was Bennett's defeat! The very contingency he had
fought so desperately to avert and for which he had sacrificed
Ferriss--Lloyd's care of so perilous a disease--behold! the mysterious
turn of the wheel had brought it about, and now he was powerless to
resist.

"Oh!" he cried, "have I not enough upon my mind already--Ferriss and his
death? Are you going to make me imperil your life too, and after I have
tried so hard? You must not stay here."

"I shall stay," she answered.

"I order you to go. This is my house. Send the doctor here. Where's
Adler?" Suddenly he fainted.

An hour or two later, in the gray of the morning, at a time when Bennett
was sleeping quietly under the influence of opiates, Lloyd found herself
sitting at the window in front of the small table there, her head
resting on her hand, thoughtful, absorbed, and watching with but
half-seeing eyes the dawn growing pink over the tops of the apple-trees
in the orchard near by.

The window was open just wide enough for the proper ventilation of the
room. For a long time she sat thus without moving, only from time to
time smoothing back the heavy, bronze-red hair from her temples and
ears. By degrees the thinking faculties of her brain, as it were, a
myriad of delicate interlacing wheels, slowly decreased in the rapidity
and intensity of their functions. She began to feel instead of to think.
As the activity of her mind lapsed to a certain pleasant numbness, a
vague, formless, nameless emotion seemed to be welling to the surface.
It was no longer a question of the brain. What then? Was it the heart?
She gave no name to this new emotion; it was too confused as yet, too
undefinable. A certain great sweetness seemed to be coming upon her, but
she could not say whether she was infinitely sad or supremely happy; a
smile was on her lips, and yet the tears began to brim in her dull-blue
eyes.

She felt as if some long, fierce struggle, or series of st