I explained to my friend the house surgeon that I wished to see certain cases in the accident ward of which I had heard; he smiled a restrained smile—­“Nurse Wade, no doubt!” but, of course, gave me permission to go up and look at them.  “Stop a minute,” he added, “and I’ll come with you.”  When we got there, my witch had already changed her dress, and was waiting for us demurely in the neat dove-coloured gown and smooth white apron of the hospital nurses.  She looked even prettier and more meaningful so than in her ethereal outside summer-cloud muslin.

“Come over to this bed,” she said at once to Travers and myself, without the least air of mystery.  “I will show you what I mean by it.”

“Nurse Wade has remarkable insight,” Travers whispered to me as we went.

“I can believe it,” I answered.

“Look at this woman,” she went on, aside, in a low voice—­“no, not the first bed; the one beyond it; Number 60.  I don’t want the patient to know you are watching her.  Do you observe anything odd about her appearance?”

“She is somewhat the same type,” I began, “as Mrs.—­”

Before I could get out the words “Le Geyt,” her warning eye and puckering forehead had stopped me.  “As the lady we were discussing,” she interposed, with a quiet wave of one hand.  “Yes, in some points very much so.  You notice in particular her scanty hair—­so thin and poor—­though she is young and good-looking?”

“It is certainly rather a feeble crop for a woman of her age,” I admitted.  “And pale at that, and washy.”

“Precisely.  It’s done up behind about as big as a nutmeg. . . .  Now, observe the contour of her back as she sits up there; it is curiously curved, isn’t it?”

“Very,” I replied.  “Not exactly a stoop, nor yet quite a hunch, but certainly an odd spinal configuration.”

“Like our friend’s, once more?”

“Like our friend’s, exactly!”

Hilda Wade looked away, lest she should attract the patient’s attention.  “Well, that woman was brought in here, half-dead, assaulted by her husband,” she went on, with a note of unobtrusive demonstration.

“We get a great many such cases,” Travers put in, with true medical unconcern, “very interesting cases; and Nurse Wade has pointed out to me the singular fact that in almost all instances the patients resemble one another physically.”

“Incredible!” I cried.  “I can understand that there might well be a type of men who assault their wives, but not, surely, a type of women who get assaulted.”

“That is because you know less about it than Nurse Wade,” Travers answered, with an annoying smile of superior knowledge.

Our instructress moved on to another bed, laying one gentle hand as she passed on a patient’s forehead.  The patient glanced gratitude.  “That one again,” she said once more, half indicating a cot at a little distance:  “Number 74.  She has much the same thin hair—­ sparse, weak, and colourless.  She has much the same curved back, and much the same aggressive, self-assertive features.  Looks capable, doesn’t she?  A born housewife! . . .  Well, she, too, was knocked down and kicked half-dead the other night by her husband.”