d
reviewing these scenes and figures, to extract a meaning from them; but
he was no nearer the heart of the mystery when the morning broke and he
was waked by the shrill chatter of the sparrows. The day, however,
brought an event which shed a lurid light upon the Courtney difficulty,
and revealed a vital connection between facts which Lefevre had not
guessed were related.

Chapter V.

The Remarkable Case of Lady Mary Fane.

It was the kind of day that is called seasonable. If the sun had been
obscured, the air would have been felt to be wintry; but the sunshine
was full and warm, and so the world rejoiced, and declared it was a
perfectly lovely May day,--just as a man who is charmed with the smiles
and beauty of a woman, thinks her complete though she may have a heart
of ice. Lefevre, as he went his hospital round that afternoon, found his
patients revelling in the sunlight like flies. He himself was in
excellent spirits, and he said a cheery or facetious word here and there
as he passed, which gave infinite delight to the thin and bloodless
atomies under his care; for a joke from so serious and awful a being as
the doctor is to a desponding patient better than all the drugs of the
pharmacopoeia: it is as exquisite and sustaining as a divine text of
promise to a religious enthusiast.

Dr Lefevre was thus passing round his female ward, with a train of
attentive students at his heels, when the door was swung open and two
attendants entered, bearing a stretcher between them, and accompanied by
the house-physician and a policeman.

"What is this?" asked Lefevre, with a touch of severity; for it was
irregular to intrude a fresh case into a ward while the physician was
going his round.

"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