Next day Lefevre learned that the police had been again baffled in their part of the inquiry. The detective had contrived to trace his man though not till the morning after the event to the St Pancras Hotel, where he had dined in private, and gone to bed early, and whence he had departed on foot before any one was astir, to catch, it was surmised, the first train. But wherever he had gone, it was just as in the former case: from the time the hotel door had closed on his cloaked figure, all trace of him was lost.

Nor could Lady Mary Fane add anything of moment to what Lefevre already knew or guessed. Her account of her adventure (which she gave him in her father’s house, whither she had been removed on the third day) was as follows: She was returning home from St Thomas’s Hospital, dressed according to her habit when she went there; she had crossed Westminster Bridge, and was proceeding straight into St James’s Park, when she became aware of a man walking in the same direction as herself, and at the same pace. She casually noted that he looked like a distinguished foreigner, and that he had about him an indefinable suggestion of death clinging with an eager, haggard hope to life, a suggestion which melted the heart of the beholder, as if it were the mute appeal of a drowning sailor. She was stirred to pity; and when he suddenly appeared to reel from weakness, she stepped out to him on an overwhelming impulse, laid a steadying hand on his arm, and asked what ailed him. He turned on her a pair of wonderful dark eyes, which were animal-like in their simple, direct appeal, and their moist softness. He begged her to lead him aside into a path by which few would pass: he disliked being stared at. Thinking only of him as a creature in sickness and distress, she obeyed without a thought for herself. She helped him to sit down upon a bench, and sat down by him and felt his pulse. He looked at her with an open, kindly eye, with a simple-seeming gratitude, which held her strangely (though she only perceived that clearly on looking back). He said to her suddenly,

“There was a deep, mystical truth in the teaching of the Church to its children that they should prefer in their moments of human weakness to pray to the Virgin-mother; for woman is always man’s best friend.”

She looked in his face, wondering at him, still with her finger on his pulse, when she felt an unconsciousness come over her, not unlike “the thick, sweet mystery of chloroform;” and she knew no more till she opened her eyes in the hospital bed. “Revived by you,” she said to Lefevre.

He inquired further, as to her sensations before unconsciousness, and she replied in these striking words: “I felt as if I were strung upon a complicated system of threads, and as if they tingled and tingled, and grew tighter to numbness.” That answer, he saw, was kindred to the description given by the young officer of his condition. It was clear that in both cases the nerves had been seriously played upon; but for what purpose? What was the secret of the stranger’s endeavour? What did he seek? and what find? To these questions no satisfactory answer would come for the asking, so that in his impatience he was tempted to break through the severe self-restraint of science, and let unfettered fancy find an answer.

But, most of all, he longed to see close to him the man whom the police sought for in and out, to judge for himself what might be the method and the purpose of his strange outrages. He scarcely desired his capture, for he thought of the possible results to Julius, and yet Day after day passed, and still the man was unfound, and very soon a change came over Lefevre’s life, which lifted it so far above the plane of his daily professional experience, that all speculation about the mysterious “M. Dolaro,” and his probable relation to Julius, fell for a time into the dim background. The doctor had been calling daily in Carlton Terrace to see his patient, when, on a certain memorable day, he intimated to her father that she was so completely recovered that there was no need of his calling on her professionally again. The old lord, looking a little flustered, asked him if he could spare a few minutes’ conversation, and led him into his study.

“My dear Lefevre,” said he, “I am at a loss how to make you any adequate return for what you have done for my daughter. Money can’t do it; no, nor my friendship either, though you are so kind as to say so. But I have an idea, which I think it best to set before you frankly. You are a bachelor: it is not good to be a bachelor,” he went on, laying his hand affectionately on the doctor’s arm, and flushing old man of the world though he was flushing to the eyes. “What what do you think of my daughter? I mean, not as a doctor, but as a man?”

Lefevre was not in his first youth, and he had had his admirations for women in his time, as all healthy men must have, but yet he was made as deliriously dizzy as if he were a boy by his guess at what Lord Rivercourt meant.

“Why,” he stammered, “I think her the most beautiful, intelligent, and and attractive woman I know.”

“Yes,” said her father, “I believe she is pretty well in all these ways. But and you see I frankly expose my whole position to you what would you think of her for a wife?”

“Frankly, then,” said Lefevre, “I find I have admired her from the beginning of this, but I had no notion of letting my admiration go farther, because I conceived that she was quite beyond my hopes.”

“My dear fellow,” said Lord Rivercourt, “you have relieved me and delighted me immensely. I know no man that I would like so well for a son-in-law. And after all, it is only fitting that the life you have saved with such risk to yourself oh, I know all about it should be devoted to making yours happy. And and I understand from her mother that Mary is quite of the same opinion herself. Now, will you go and speak to her at once, or will you wait till another day? You will have to decide that,” said he, with a smile, “not only as lover, but as doctor.”

Lefevre hesitated for but an instant; for what true, manly lover would have decided to withdraw till another day when the door to his mistress was held open to him?

“I’ll see her now,” he said.

Lord Rivercourt led the doctor back to his daughter, and left him with her. There were some moments of chilling doubt and cold uncertainty, and then came a rush of warm feeling at the bidding of a shy glance from Lady Mary. He bent over her and murmured he scarcely knew what, but he heard clearly and with a divine ecstasy a softly-whispered “Yes!” which thrilled in his heart for days and months afterwards, and then he turned to him her face, her beautiful face illumined with love, and kissed it: between two who had been drawn together as they had, what words were needed, or what could poor words convey?

About an hour later he walked to Savile Row to dress and return for dinner. He walked, because he felt surcharged with life. He desired peace and goodwill among men; he pitied with all his soul the weary and the broken whom he met, and wondered with regret that men should get irremediably involved in the toils of their own misdeeds; he was profuse with coppers, and even small silver, to the wretched waifs of society who swept the crossings he had to take on his triumphant way; he would even have bestowed forgiveness on his greatest enemy if he had met him then; for the divine joy of love was singing in his heart and raising him to the serene and glorious empyrean of heroes and gods. Oh matchless magic of the human heart, which confounds all the hypotheses of science, and flouts all its explanations!

It was that evening when he and Lady Mary sat in sweet converse that she said to him these words, which he hung for ever after about his heart

“Surely, never before did a man win a wife as you have won me! You made me well by putting your own life into me; so what could I do but give you the life that was already your own!”

Thus day followed day on golden wings: Lefevre in the morning occupied with the patients that thronged his consulting-room; in the afternoon dispensing healing, and, where healing was impossible, cheerfulness and courage, in his hospital wards; and in the evening finding inspiration and strength in the company of Lady Mary for her love was to him better than wine. All who went to him in those days found him changed, and in a sense glorified. He had always been considerate and kind; but the weakness, the folly, and the wickedness of poor human nature, which were often laid bare to his searching scrutiny, had frequently plunged him into a welter of despondency and shame, out of which he would cry, “Alas for God’s image! Alas for the temple of the Holy Ghost!” But in those days it seemed as if disease and death appeared to him mere trivial accidents of life, with the result that no “case,” however bad, was sent away empty of hope.