“I thought, sir,” said the house-physician, “you would like to see her at once:  it seems to me a case similar to that of the man found in the Brighton train.”

“Where was this lady found?” asked Lefevre of the policeman.  He used the word “lady” advisedly, for though the dress was that of a hospital nurse or probationer, the unconscious face was that of an educated gentlewoman.  “Why, bless my soul!” he cried, upon more particular scrutiny of her features—­“it seems to me I know her!  Surely I do!  Where did you say she was found?”

The policeman explained that he was on his beat outside St James’s Park, when a park-keeper called him in and showed him, in one of the shady walks, the lady set on a bench as if she had fainted.  The keeper said he had taken particular notice of her, because he saw from her dress and her veil she was a hospital lady.  When he first set eyes on her, an old gentleman was sitting talking to her—­a strange, dark, foreign-looking gentleman, in a soft hat and a big Inverness cape.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed the doctor.  “The very man!  That’s the meaning of it.  And I did not guess!”

His assistant and the policeman gazed at him in surprise; but he recovered himself and asked, with a serious and determined knitting of the brows, if the policeman had seen the old gentleman.  The policeman replied he had not; the gentleman was nowhere to be seen when he was called in.  The keeper saw him only once; when he returned that way again, in about a quarter of an hour, he found the lady alone and apparently asleep.  She had a very handsome umbrella by her side, and therefore he kept within eye-shot of her on this side and on that, lest some park-loafer should seize so good a chance of thieving.  He thus passed her two or three times.  The last time, he remarked that she had slipped a little to one side, and that her umbrella had fallen to the ground.  He went to pick it up, and it struck him as he bent that she looked strangely quiet and pale.  He spoke to her; she made no reply.  He touched her—­he even in his fear ventured to shake her—­but she made no sign; and he ran to call the policeman.  They then brought her straight to the hospital, because they could see she was a hospital lady of some sort.

“It must—­it must be the same!” said Lefevre.

“I thought, when I first heard of it below,” said the house-physician, “that it must be the same man as was the cause of the other case, in the Brighton train.”

“No doubt it is the same.  But I was thinking of it in another—­a far more serious sense!” Then turning to the waiting policeman, he said, “Of course, you must report this to your inspector?”

“Yes, sir,” said the policeman.

“Give him my compliments, then, and say I shall see him presently.”