For the first moment she did not connect the placard with her lover; she permitted herself to be amused at the thought of a spectator having his finger bitten, but in the next instant a doubt arose and she hurriedly bought the paper. “This morning the ‘Man in the Zoo,’ whose real name is Mr. John Cromartie, was shockingly mauled by Daphne, the Orang in the next cage to his.” Josephine read the account of the affair right through very slowly. It appeared that about eleven o’clock that morning Cromartie had been playing ball in his cage with the Caracal. In dodging the Caracal he had fallen heavily against the wire mesh partition separating him from the Orang. While he had rested there for a moment the spectators were horrified to see him seized by the Orang, which caught him by the hair. Mr. Cromartie had put up his hands to prevent his face being scratched, and the Orang had managed to get hold of his fingers and had cracked the bones of them. Mr. Cromartie had shown great courage and had succeeded in freeing himself before the arrival of the keeper. Two fingers were crushed and the bones fractured; he had sustained several severe scalp wounds and a scratched face. The only danger to be feared was blood poisoning, as the injuries inflicted by apes are well known to be peculiarly venomous. On reading this Josephine suddenly remembered how the King of Greece had died from the effects of a monkey bite, and she became more and more alarmed. She called a taxi, got into it, and told the driver to take her to the Zoological Gardens as fast as he could. All the way there she was in a fever of agitation, and could settle nothing in her own mind. Having arrived at the Zoo, she went straight to the house of the resident curator, and was just in time to see Mr. Cromartie being carried in on a stretcher, but before she could come up to it the door was shut in her face. She rang, but it was almost five minutes before the door was opened by a maidservant who took her card in, with the request that she might see the curator as she was a friend of Mr. Cromartie’s. Before the maid came back, however, the curator came out, and Josephine explained her visit without any embarrassment. She was invited in, and found herself in a fine well-lit dining-room in the presence of two gentlemen in morning dress, and both with bushy eyebrows. The curator introduced her as a friend of Mr. Cromartie’s, and they both gave her a very keen look and bowed.