“She must have been thinking of something else when she grabbed him.  For she missed her grip.  Then he fell and was frightened, and she must have lost her nerve.  Hephaestus knew it, and sprang.  That is always the case when wild animals turn.  All accidents happen like that.”

His words filled me with a new and sickening dread.

"She must have been thinking of something else." Of what else but of my presence there?  That stupid, selfish wave of the handkerchief!  I sat gnawing my hands and cursing myself.

The ambulance arrived.  Men hurried past my box.  I waited again in agony of mind.  At last the porter came and cleared the passage and doorway of loungers, and I heard the tread of footsteps and gruff directions.  The manager and a man in a frock-coat and black tie, whom I recognised as the doctor, came down the passage, followed by two great men carrying between them a stretcher covered by a sheet on which lay all that I loved in life.  Dawkins followed, weeping, and then came several theatre folk.  I went outside and saw the stretcher put into the ambulance-van, and then I made myself known to the doctor.

“She has received very great injuries—­chiefly the right cheek and eye.  So much so that she needs an oculist’s care at once.  I have telephoned to Dr. Steinholz, of No. 4, Thiergarten, one of our ablest oculists, to receive her now into his clinique.  If you care to do so, you are welcome to accompany me.”

I drove through the gay, flaring streets of Berlin like a man in a phantasmagoria of horror.

CHAPTER XXIV

The first time they allowed me to see her was after many days of nerve-racking anxiety.  I had indeed called at the clinique two or three times a day for news, and I had written short letters of comfort and received weirdly-spelt messages taken down from Lola’s dictation by a nurse with an imperfect knowledge of English.  These kept the heart in me; for the doctor’s reports were invariably grave—­possible loss of sight in the injured eye and permanent disfigurement their most hopeful prognostications.  I lived, too, in a nervous agony of remorse.  For whatever happened I held myself responsible.  At first they thought her life was in danger.  I passed nightmare days.  Then the alarming symptoms subsided, and it was a question of the saving of the eye and the decent healing of the cheek torn deep by the claws of the accursed brute.  When Quast informed me of its summary execution I felt the primitive savage arise in me, and I upbraided Quast for not having invited me to gloat over its expiring throes.  How the days passed I know not.  I wandered about the streets, looking into the windows of the great shops, buying flowers and fruit for Lola in eccentric quantities.  Or sitting in beerhouses reading the financial pages of a German paper held upside down.  I could not return to London.  Still less could I investigate the German philanthropic methods of rescuing fallen women.  I wrote to Campion a brief account of what had happened and besought him to set a deputy to work on the regeneration of the Judds.