Succeed she would and must. Her inborn obstinacy, her sturdy refusal to yield her ground, whatever it should be, her stubborn power of resistance, her tenacity of her chosen course, came to her aid as she drew swiftly near to the spot whereon the battle would be fought. Mentally she braced herself, holding back with all her fine, hard-tempered, native strength. No, she would not yield the life to the Enemy; no, she would not give up; no, she would not recede. Let the Enemy do his worst--she was strong against his efforts. At Medford, which she reached toward four in the afternoon, after an hour's ride from the City, she found a conveyance waiting for her, and was driven rapidly through streets bordered with villas and closely shaven lawns to a fair-sized country seat on the outskirts of the town. The housekeeper met her at the door with the information that the doctor was, at the moment, in the sick-room, and had left orders that the nurse should be brought to him the moment she arrived. The housekeeper showed Lloyd the way to the second landing, knocking upon the half-open door at the end of the hall, and ushering her in without waiting for an answer. Lloyd took in the room at a glance--the closely drawn curtains, the screen between the bed and the windows, the doctor standing on the hearth-rug, and the fever-inflamed face of the patient on the pillow. Then all her power of self-repression could not keep her from uttering a smothered exclamation. For she, the woman who, with all the savage energy of him, Bennett loved, had, at peril of her life, come to nurse Bennett's nearest friend, the man of all others dear to him--Richard Ferriss. VI. Two days after Dr. Pitts had brought Ferriss to his country house in the outskirts of Medford he had been able to diagnose his sickness as typhoid fever, and at once had set about telegraphing the fact to Bennett. Then it had occurred to him that he did not know where Bennett had gone. Bennett had omitted notifying him of his present whereabouts, and, acting upon Dr. Pitts' advice, had hidden himself away from everybody. Neither at his club nor at his hotel, where his mail accumulated in extraordinary quantities, had any forwarding address been left. Bennett would not even know that Ferriss had been moved to Medford. So much the worse. It could not be helped. There was nothing for the doctor to do but to leave Bennett in ignorance and go ahead and fight for the life of Ferriss as best he could. Pitts arranged for a brother physician to take over his practice, and devoted himself entirely to Ferriss. And Ferriss sickened and sickened, and went steadily from bad to worse. The fever advanced regularly to a certain stage, a stage of imminent danger, and there paused. Rarely had Pitts been called upon to fight a more virulent form of the disease.