I used what persuasion and arguments I could, and assured her I would communicate immediately with Miss Hurd and Hetty, and tell them how matters stood here, though I hated to distress the poor child with such reports being circulated about her. She agreed it was a great shame, and, too, just as she was so happy and feeling so like her old self. As soon as she had gone, in the same room where she had been sitting, Miss Hurd sat and, heading the letter from Providence, wrote to the girl’s mother, begging her to let Hetty stay another month at least, pleading her need, and her physician’s opinion that a change of companions just then would be very prejudicial to her--a letter which the family could show to doubting friends, thus allaying suspicion. This letter, inclosed in one to Hetty, was sent back with the Providence post-mark, and the family quieted down. This was near a month before the baby came--an anxious month for me, what must it have been for Hetty! The baby died in two weeks. I felt relieved; it simplified things; but Hetty’s grief was real and deep: “Oh, Doctor, my baby is dead!” she wrote. She was not a “Hetty Sorrel,” after all, as I had sometimes thought her, but a sorrowing mother, her shame and fear of detection--everything--forgotten in her anguish over the death of her illegitimate baby! The night she came home, meeting her train, I went with her to her door. I longed to go in and help her face her family; but that could not be. She had brought back to me all the letters I had written her, with a lock of her baby’s hair--a tiny silken curl which the doctor had cut from the dead baby’s head. The pathos of it! the little curl was folded in a powder paper, and put in a tiny box marked “mourning-pins.” “I don’t dare to take it home with me, but you will keep it for me,” she said. We had been preparing her family for her altered appearance: she was supposed to be worn out from caring for the invalid, and, the last two weeks, to have had a severe attack of dysentery. By her manner of dress she was to arrange that her figure should appear much as when she went away; but, oh, her face!--they must have been blind, indeed, if they could not see that it was not, and never would be again, the round girlish face they had known. It was the face of a saddened woman. Her grief for her baby was pitiful, and she was denied even the comfort of that little lock of hair! Months later she told me her people never learned the truth, but I sometimes felt that they must have surmised more than they let her know; and yet, perhaps not. By a ruse I got from her subsequently the name of her child’s father, making her think I knew it when only suspecting it--a strange thing this--the woman’s loyalty in shielding the man! My little “Hetty Sorrel” began to show the more heroic traits of “Hester Prynne.” I kept in touch with her for several years.