to the patient's hands. A shiver ran through the frame of both Lefevre and his companion, a convulsive shudder passed upon the unconscious body, and—a strange cry rang out upon the silence of the ward, and Lefevre withdrew his hands. He and the house-physician looked at each other pale and shaken. The nurse came running at the cry. Lefevre looked out beyond the screen to reassure her, and saw in the dim red reflection of the firelight a sight which struck him gruesomely, used though he was to hospital sights; all about the ward pale scared figures were sitting up in bed, like corpses suddenly raised from the dead. He bent over his patient, who presently opened his eyes and stared at him.

"Get some brandy and milk," said Lefevre to his companion.

"Who? Where am I?" murmured the patient in a faint voice.

"I am Dr Lefevre, and this is St. James's Hospital."

"Doctor?—hospital?—oh, I'm dreaming!" murmured the patient.

"We'll talk about that when you have taken some of this," said Lefevre, as the house-physician reappeared with the nurse, bearing the brandy and milk.

Lefevre presently told him how he had been found in the train, and taken for dead till the card—"this card," said he, taking it from the top of the locker—was discovered on him. The young man listened in open amazement, and looked at the card.

"I know nothing of this!" said he. "I never saw the card before! I never heard your name or the hospital's till a minute ago."

"Your case was strange before," said Lefevre; "this makes it stranger. Who journeyed with you?"

"A man,—a nice, strange, oldish fellow in a fur coat." And the young man wished to enter upon a narrative, when the doctor interrupted him.

"You're not well enough to talk much now. Tell me to-morrow all about it."

The doctor returned home, his imagination occupied with the vision of a train rushing at express speed over the metals, and of a compartment in the train in which a young man reclined under the spell of an old man. The young man's face he saw clearly, but the old man's evaded him like a dream, and yet he felt he ought to know one who knew the peculiar repute of the St. James's Hospital. Next day the young man told his story, which was in effect as follows: He was a subaltern in a dragoon regiment stationed in Brighton. On Sunday afternoon he had set out for London on several days' leave. He had taken a seat in a smoking-carriage, and was preparing to make himself comfortable with a novel and a cigar, when an elderly gentleman, who looked like a foreigner, came in as the train was about to move. He particularly observed the man from the first, because, though it was a pleasant spring day, he looked pinched and shrunken with cold in his great fur overcoat, and because he had remarked him standing on the platform and scrutinizing the passengers hurrying into the train. The gentleman sat down in the seat opposite the young officer, and drew his fur wrap close about him. The young officer could not keep his eyes off him, and he noted that his features seemed worn thin and arid, as by passage through terrific peril,—as if he had been travelling for many days without sleep and without food, straining forward to a goal of safety, sick both in stomach and heart,—as if he had been rushing, like the maniac of the Gospel, through dry places, seeking rest and finding none. His hair, which should have been black, looked lustreless and bleached, and his skin seemed as if his blood had lost all colour and generosity, as if nothing but serum flowed in his veins. His eyes alone did not look bloodless; they were weary and extravasated, as from anxious watching. The young officer's compassion went out to the stranger; for he thought he must be a conspirator, fleeing probably from the infamous tyranny of Russian rule. But presently he spoke in such good English that the idea of his being a Russian faded away.

"Excuse the liberty I take," said he, with a singularly winning smile; "but let me advise you not to smoke that cigar. I have a peculiarly sensitive nose for tobacco, and my nose informs me that your cigar, though good as cigars go, is not fit for you to smoke."

The young officer was surprised that he was rather charmed than offended by this impertinence.

"Let me offer you one of these instead," said the strange gentleman; "we call them—I won't trouble you with the Spanish name—but in English it means 'Joys of Spain.'"

The officer took and thanked him for a "Joy of Spain," and found the flavour and aroma so excellent that, to use his own phrase, he could have eaten it. He asked the stranger what in particular was his objection to the other cigar.

"This objection," said he, "which is common to all ill-prepared tobaccos, that it lowers the vital force. You don't feel that yet, because you are young and healthy, and gifted with a superabundance of fine vitality; but you may by smoking one bad cigar bring the time a day nearer when you must feel it. And even now it would take a little off the keen edge of the appetite for pleasure. How little," said he, "do we understand how to keep ourselves in condition for the complete enjoyment of life! You, I suppose, are about to take your pleasure in town, and instead of judiciously tickling and stimulating your nerves for the complete fulfilment of the pleasures you contemplate, you begin—you were beginning, I mean, with your own cigar—to dull and stupefy them. Don't you see how foolish that is?"

The young officer admitted that it was very foolish and very true; and they talked on thus, the elder exercising a charm over the younger such as he had never known before in the society of any man. In a quarter of an hour the young man felt as if he had known and trusted and loved his neighbour all his life; he felt, he confessed, so strongly attracted that he could have hugged him. He told him about his family, and showed him the innermost secrets of his heart; and all the while he smoked the delicious "Joy of Spain," and felt more and more enthralled and fascinated by the stranger's eyes, which, as he talked, lightened and glowed more and more as their glance played caressingly about him. He was beginning to wonder at that, when with some emphatic phrase the stranger laid his fingers on his knee, upon which a thrill shot through him as if a woman had touched him. He looked in the stranger's face, and the wonderful eyes seemed to search to the root of his being, and to draw the soul out of him. He had a flying thought—"Can it be a woman, after all, in this strange shape?" and he knew no more ... till he woke in the hospital bed.

That was the patient's story.

"Just look over your property here," said the doctor. "Have you lost anything?"

The young man turned over his watch and the contents of his purse, and answered that he had lost nothing.

"Strange—strange!" said Lefevre—"very strange! And the card—of course the stranger must have put it in your pocket."

"Which would seem to imply," said the young man, "that he knows something of the hospital."

"Well," said Lefevre, "we must see what can be done to clear the mystery up."

"Some of those newspaper-men have been here," said the house-physician, when they had left the ward, "and they will be sure to call again before the day is out. Shall I tell them anything of this?"

"Certainly," said Lefevre. "Publicity may help us to discover this amazing stranger."

"Do you quite believe the story?" asked the house-physician.

"I don't disbelieve it."

"But what did the stranger do to put him in that condition, which seems something more than hypnotism?"

"Ah," said Lefevre, "I don't yet understand it; but there are forces in Nature which few can comprehend, and which only one here and there can control and use."