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 pavement and passing among the crowd in search, doubtless, of a fresh victim for occult experiment or outrage! That conclusion once determined, shock after shock smote upon his sense. What if the mysterious person were really proved to be Julius's father? What if he had entered upon a course of experiment or outrage (he passed in rapid review the mysteries of the Paris pavement and the Brighton train, and this of the Park)--outrage yet unnamable because unknown, but which would amaze and confound society, and bring signal punishment upon the offender? And what--what if Julius knew all that, and therefore sought to keep his parentage hidden? "She is ready, doctor," said the Sister of the ward at his elbow, adding with a touch of excitement in her manner as he turned to her, "do you know who she is? Look at this card; we noticed the name first on her linen."