itts brought him here. This is his
house. We do not know if he will get well. It is only by watching him
every instant that we can hope for anything. At this moment there is no
one with him but a servant. _Now_, Mr. Bennett, am I to go to my
patient?"

"But--but--we can get some one else."

"Not before three hours, and it's only the truth when I tell you he may
die at any minute. Am I to go?"

In a second of time the hideous situation leaped up before Bennett's
eyes. Right or wrong, the conviction that Lloyd was terribly imperilling
her life by remaining at her patient's bedside had sunk into his mind
and was not to be eradicated. It was a terror that had gripped him close
and that could not be reasoned away. But Ferriss? What of him? Now it
had brusquely transpired that his life, too, hung in the balance. How to
decide? How to meet this abominable complication wherein he must
sacrifice the woman he so dearly loved or the man who was the Damon to
his Pythias, the Jonathan to his David?

"Am I to go?" repeated Lloyd for the third time.

Bennett closed his eyes, clasping his head with both hands.

"Great God, wait--wait--I can't think--I--I, oh, this is terrible!"

Lloyd drove home her advantage mercilessly.

"Wait? I tell you we can't wait."

Then Bennett realised with a great spasm of horror that for him there
was no going back. All his life, accustomed to quick decisions in
moments of supreme peril, he took his decision now, facing, with such
courage as he could muster, its unspeakable consequences, consequences
that he knew must harry and hound him all the rest of his life.
Whichever way he decided, he opened his heart to the beak and talons of
a pitiless remorse. He could no longer see, in the dreadful confusion of
his mind, the right of things or the wrong of things, could not
accurately weigh chances or possibilities. For him only two alternatives
presented themselves, the death of Ferriss or the death of Lloyd. He
could see no compromise, could imagine no escape. It was as though a
headsman with ready axe stood at his elbow, awaiting his commands. And,
besides all this, he had long since passed the limit--though perhaps he
did not know it himself--where he could see anything but the point he
had determined to gain, the goal he had determined to reach. His mind
was made up. His furious energy, his resolve to conquer at all costs,
had become at last a sort of directed frenzy. The engine he had set in
moti