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