keeper said he
had taken particular notice of her, because he saw from her dress and
her veil she was a hospital lady. When he first set eyes on her, an old
gentleman was sitting talking to her--a strange, dark, foreign-looking
gentleman, in a soft hat and a big Inverness cape.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed the doctor. "The very man! That's the meaning
of it. And I did not guess!"

His assistant and the policeman gazed at him in surprise; but he
recovered himself and asked, with a serious and determined knitting of
the brows, if the policeman had seen the old gentleman. The policeman
replied he had not; the gentleman was nowhere to be seen when he was
called in. The keeper saw him only once; when he returned that way
again, in about a quarter of an hour, he found the lady alone and
apparently asleep. She had a very handsome umbrella by her side, and
therefore he kept within eye-shot of her on this side and on that, lest
some park-loafer should seize so good a chance of thieving. He thus
passed her two or three times. The last time, he remarked that she had
slipped a little to one side, and that her umbrella had fallen to the
ground. He went to pick it up, and it struck him as he bent that she
looked strangely quiet and pale. He spoke to her; she made no reply. He
touched her--he even in his fear ventured to shake her--but she made no
sign; and he ran to call the policeman. They then brought her straight
to the hospital, because they could see she was a hospital lady of some
sort.

"It must--it must be the same!" said Lefevre.

"I thought, when I first heard of it below," said the house-physician,
"that it must be the same man as was the cause of the other case, in the
Brighton train."

"No doubt it is the same. But I was thinking of it in another--a far
more serious sense!" Then turning to the waiting policeman, he said, "Of
course, you must report this to your inspector?"

"Yes, sir," said the policeman.

"Give him my compliments, then, and say I shall see him presently."

Yet, he thought, how could he speak to the official, with all that he
suspected, all that he feared, in his heart? With his attention on the
_qui vive_ with his experiences and speculations of the night, he was
seized, as we have seen, by the conclusion that the "strange, dark,
foreign-looking gentleman" of the park-keeper's story was the same whose
steps he had followed the evening before, without guessing that the man
was perambulating the