Contains a Love Interlude.

Next day Lefevre learned that the police had been again baffled in their part of the inquiry.  The detective had contrived to trace his man—­though not till the morning after the event—­to the St Pancras Hotel, where he had dined in private, and gone to bed early, and whence he had departed on foot before any one was astir, to catch, it was surmised, the first train.  But wherever he had gone, it was just as in the former case:  from the time the hotel door had closed on his cloaked figure, all trace of him was lost.

Nor could Lady Mary Fane add anything of moment to what Lefevre already knew or guessed.  Her account of her adventure (which she gave him in her father’s house, whither she had been removed on the third day) was as follows:  She was returning home from St Thomas’s Hospital, dressed according to her habit when she went there; she had crossed Westminster Bridge, and was proceeding straight into St James’s Park, when she became aware of a man walking in the same direction as herself, and at the same pace.  She casually noted that he looked like a distinguished foreigner, and that he had about him an indefinable suggestion of death clinging with an eager, haggard hope to life,—­a suggestion which melted the heart of the beholder, as if it were the mute appeal of a drowning sailor.  She was stirred to pity; and when he suddenly appeared to reel from weakness, she stepped out to him on an overwhelming impulse, laid a steadying hand on his arm, and asked what ailed him.  He turned on her a pair of wonderful dark eyes, which were animal-like in their simple, direct appeal, and their moist softness.  He begged her to lead him aside into a path by which few would pass:  he disliked being stared at.  Thinking only of him as a creature in sickness and distress, she obeyed without a thought for herself.  She helped him to sit down upon a bench, and sat down by him and felt his pulse.  He looked at her with an open, kindly eye, with a simple-seeming gratitude, which held her strangely (though she only perceived that clearly on looking back).  He said to her suddenly,—­

“There was a deep, mystical truth in the teaching of the Church to its children—­that they should prefer in their moments of human weakness to pray to the Virgin-mother; for woman is always man’s best friend.”

She looked in his face, wondering at him, still with her finger on his pulse, when she felt an unconsciousness come over her, not unlike “the thick, sweet mystery of chloroform;” and she knew no more till she opened her eyes in the hospital bed.  “Revived by you,” she said to Lefevre.

He inquired further, as to her sensations before unconsciousness, and she replied in these striking words:  “I felt as if I were strung upon a complicated system of threads, and as if they tingled and tingled, and grew tighter to numbness.”  That answer, he saw, was kindred to the description given by the young officer of his condition.  It was clear that in both cases the nerves had been seriously played upon; but for what purpose?  What was the secret of the stranger’s endeavour?  What did he seek?—­and what find?  To these questions no satisfactory answer would come for the asking, so that in his impatience he was tempted to break through the severe self-restraint of science, and let unfettered fancy find an answer.