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.
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