She let the point of her parasol make a curved trail on the gravel, and followed its serpentine wavings with her eyes. “You know our house surgeon?” she asked at last, looking up of a sudden.
“What, Travers? Oh, intimately.”
“Then come to my ward and see. After you have seen, you will perhaps believe me.”
Nothing that I could say would get any further explanation out of her just then. “You would laugh at me if I told you,” she persisted; “you won’t laugh when you have seen it.”
We walked on in silence as far as Hyde Park Corner. There my Sphinx tripped lightly up the steps of St. George’s Hospital. “Get Mr. Travers’s leave,” she said, with a nod, and a bright smile, “to visit Nurse Wade’s ward. Then come up to me there in five minutes.”
I explained to my friend the house surgeon that I wished to see certain cases in the accident ward of which I had heard; he smiled a restrained smile—“Nurse Wade, no doubt!” but, of course, gave me permission to go up and look at them. “Stop a minute,” he added, “and I’ll come with you.” When we got there, my witch had already changed her dress, and was waiting for us demurely in the neat dove-coloured gown and smooth white apron of the hospital nurses. She looked even prettier and more meaningful so than in her ethereal outside summer-cloud muslin.
“Come over to this bed,” she said at once to Travers and myself, without the least air of mystery. “I will show you what I mean by it.”
“Nurse Wade has remarkable insight,” Travers whispered to me as we went.
“I can believe it,” I answered.
“Look at this woman,” she went on, aside, in a low voice—“no, not the first bed; the one beyond it; Number 60. I don’t want the patient to know you are watching her. Do you observe anything odd about her appearance?”
“She is somewhat the same type,” I began, “as Mrs.—”
Before I could get out the words “Le Geyt,” her warning eye and puckering forehead had stopped me. “As the lady we were discussing,” she interposed, with a quiet wave of one hand. “Yes, in some points very much so. You notice in particular her scanty hair—so thin and poor—though she is young and good-looking?”
“It is certainly rather a feeble crop for a woman of her age,” I admitted. “And pale at that, and washy.”
“Precisely. It’s done up behind about as big as a nutmeg.… Now, observe the contour of her back as she sits up there; it is curiously curved, isn’t it?”
“Very,” I replied. “Not exactly a stoop, nor yet quite a hunch, but certainly an odd spinal configuration.”
“Like our friend’s, once more?”
“Like our friend’s, exactly!”
Hilda Wade looked away, lest she should attract the patient’s attention. “Well, that woman was brought in here, half-dead, assaulted by her husband,” she went on, with a note of unobtrusive demonstration.
“We get a great many such cases,” Travers put in, with true medical unconcern, “very interesting cases; and Nurse Wade has pointed out to me the singular fact that in almost all instances the patients resemble one another physically.”