That night and the following day were terrible. Lloyd neither ate nor slept. Not once did she set foot out of her room, giving out that she was ill, which was not far from the truth, and keeping to herself and to the companionship of the thoughts and terrors that crowded her mind. Until that day at Medford her life had run easily and happily and in well-ordered channels. She was successful in her chosen profession and work. She imagined herself to be stronger and of finer fibre than most other women, and her love for Bennett had lent a happiness and a sweetness to her life dear to her beyond all words. Suddenly, and within an hour's time, she had lost everything. Her will had been broken, her spirit crushed; she had been forced to become fearfully instrumental in causing the death of her patient--a man who loved and trusted her--while her love for Bennett, which for years had been her deep and abiding joy, the one great influence of her life, was cold and dead, and could never be revived. This in the end came to be Lloyd's greatest grief. She could forget that she herself had been humbled and broken. Horrible, unspeakably horrible, as Ferriss's death seemed to her, it was upon Bennett, and not upon her, that its responsibility must be laid. She had done what she could. Of that she was assured. But, first and above all things, Lloyd was a woman, and her love for Bennett was a very different matter. When, during that never-to-be-forgotten scene in the breakfast-room of the doctor's house, she had warned Bennett that if he persisted in his insane resolution he would stamp out her affection for him, Lloyd had only half believed what she said. But when at last it dawned upon her that she had spoken wiser than she knew, that this was actually true, and that now, no matter how she might desire it, she could not love him any longer, it seemed as though her heart must break. It was precisely as though Bennett himself, the Bennett she had known, had been blotted out of existence. It was much worse than if Bennett had merely died. Even then he would have still existed for her, somewhere. As it was, the man she had known simply ceased to be, irrevocably, finally, and the warmth of her love dwindled and grew cold, because now there was nothing left for it to feed upon.