told herself that she could
read the man's thoughts aright. She even fancied she caught a mute
appeal in his eyes upon those rare occasions when they met, as though he
looked to her as the only hope, the only means to wake Bennett from his
lethargy. She imagined that she heard him say:

"Ain't you got any influence with him, Miss? Won't you talk good talk to
him? Don't let him chuck. Make him be a man, and not a professor.
Nothing else in the world don't figure. It's his work. God A'mighty cut
him out for that, and he's got to do it."

His work, his work, God made him for that; appointed the task, made the
man, and now she came between. God, Man, and the Work,--the three vast
elements of an entire system, the whole universe epitomised in the
tremendous trinity. Again and again such thoughts assailed her. Duty
once more stirred and awoke. It seemed to her as if some great engine
ordained of Heaven to run its appointed course had come to a standstill,
was rusting to its ruin, and that she alone of all the world had power
to grasp its lever, to send it on its way; whither, she did not know;
why, she could not tell. She knew only that it was right that she should
act. By degrees her resolution hardened. Bennett must try again. But at
first it seemed to her as though her heart would break, and more than
once she wavered.

As Bennett continued to dictate to her the story of the expedition he
arrived at the account of the march toward Kolyuchin Bay, and, finally,
at the description of the last week, with its terrors, its sufferings,
its starvation, its despair, when, one by one, the men died in their
sleeping-bags, to be buried under slabs of ice. When this point in the
narrative was reached Bennett inserted no comment of his own; but while
Lloyd wrote, read simply and with grim directness from the entries in
his journal precisely as they had been written.

Lloyd had known in a vague way that the expedition had suffered
abominably, but hitherto Bennett had never consented to tell her the
story in detail. "It was a hard week," he informed her, "a rather bad
grind."

Now, for the first time, she was to know just what had happened, just
what he had endured.

As usual, Bennett paced the floor from wall to wall, his cigar in his
teeth, his tattered, grimy ice-journal in his hand. At the desk Lloyd's
round, bare arm, the sleeve turned up to the elbow, moved evenly back
and forth as she wrote. In the intervals of Bennett's dic