IV.

On the day that Lloyd returned to the house on Calumet Square (Hattie’s recovery being long since assured), and while she was unpacking her valise and settling herself again in her room, a messenger boy brought her a note.

“Have just arrived in the City.  When may I see you?  Bennett.”

News of Ward Bennett and of Richard Ferriss had not been wanting during the past fortnight or so.  Their names and that of the ship herself, even the names of Adler, Hansen, Clarke, and Dennison, even Muck Tu, even that of Kamiska, the one surviving dog, filled the mouths and minds of men to the exclusion of everything else.

The return of the expedition after its long imprisonment in the ice and at a time when all hope of its safety had been abandoned was one of the great events of that year.  The fact that the expedition had failed to reach the Pole, or to attain any unusual high latitude, was forgotten or ignored.  Nothing was remembered but the masterly retreat toward Kolyuchin Bay, the wonderful march over the ice, the indomitable courage, unshaken by hardship, perils, obstacles, and privations almost beyond imagination.  All this, together with a multitude of details, some of them palpably fictitious, the press of the City where Bennett and Ferriss both had their homes published and republished and published again and again.  News of the men, their whereabouts and intentions, invaded the sick-room—­where Lloyd watched over the convalescence of her little patient—­by the very chinks of the windows.

Lloyd learned how the ship had been “nipped;” how, after inconceivable toil, the members of the expedition had gained the land; how they had marched southward toward the Chuckch settlements; how, at the eleventh hour, the survivors, exhausted and starving, had been rescued by the steam whalers; how these whalers themselves had been caught in the ice, and how the survivors of the Freja had been obliged to spend another winter in the Arctic.  She learned the details of their final return.  In the quiet, darkened room where Hattie lay she heard from without the echo of the thunder of the nations; she saw how the figure of Bennett towered suddenly magnificent in the world; how that the people were brusquely made aware of a new hero.  She learned that honours came thronging about him unsought; that the King of the Belgians had conferred a decoration upon him; that the geographical societies of continental Europe had elected him to honourary membership; that the President and the Secretary of War had sent telegrams of congratulations.

“And what does he do,” she murmured, “the first of all upon his return?  Asks to see me—­me!”

She sent an answer to his note by the same boy who brought it, naming the following afternoon, explaining that two days later she expected to go into the country to a little town called Bannister to take her annual fortnight’s vacation.