to her in the still watches of the night, creeping, creeping to her
bedside, looming over her in the darkness; the cold fingers reaching
closer and closer, the awful face growing ever more distinct, till the
suspense of waiting for the blow to fall, for the fingers to grip,
became more than she could bear, and she sprang from her bed with a
stifled sob of anguish, driven from her rest with quivering lips and
streaming eyes?

Abruptly Lloyd rose to her feet, the flowers falling unheeded from her
lap, her arms rigid at her side, her hands shut tight.

"No," she murmured, "I cannot. This, at last, is more than I can do."

Instantly Adler's halting words went ringing through her brain: "The
danger don't figure; nothing in the world don't figure. It's his work."

Adler's words were the words of the world. She alone of the thousands
whose eyes were turned toward Bennett was blinded. She was wrong. She
belonged to him, but he did not belong to her. The world demanded him;
the world called him from her side to do the terrible work that God had
made him for. Was she, because she loved him, because of her own single
anguish, to stand between him and the clamour of the world, between him
and his work, between him and God?

A work there was for him to do. He must play the man's part. The battle
must be fought again. That horrible, grisly Enemy far up there to the
north, upon the high curve of the globe, the shoulder of the world,
huge, remorseless, terrible in its vast, Titanic strength, guarding its
secret through all the centuries in the innermost of a thousand gleaming
coils, must be defied again. The monster that defended the great prize,
the object of so many fruitless quests must be once more attacked.

His was the work, for him the shock of battle, the rigour of the fight,
the fierce assault, the ceaseless onset, the unfailing and unflinching
courage.

Hers was the woman's part. Already she had assumed it; steadfast
unselfishness, renunciation, patience, the heroism greater than all
others, that sits with folded hands, quiet, unshaken, and under fearful
stress, endures, and endures, and endures. To be the inspiration of
great deeds, high hopes, and firm resolves, and then, while the fight
was dared, to wait in calmness for its issue--that was her duty, that,
the woman's part in the world's great work.

Lloyd was dimly conscious of a certain sweet and subtle element in her
love for Bennett that only of late she had be