o be killed, and I will be
desolate. Ach, what a misfortune!"

He began to weep.

"Good God!" I cried; "you don't mean to say that you're sorry for the
brute?"

"One can't help being fond of him. We have been for five years
inseparable companions!"

I had no sympathy to fling away on him at that moment.

"How do you account for his spring at Madame to-night? That's all I want
to know."

"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, to