"Your story is extremely interesting," I told him, "and I am especially glad to hear it, because my cook"--with a vindictive emphasis on the cook--"has told me quite a different one as to how she came by her broken head. Now--" He was gone. He threw all pretence to the winds and ran downstairs as if the police were at his heels, as I wished they were. I could not run after him without making a second scandal in the house; and if I had caught him, if I had given him in custody for trespass, as I was told afterwards I might have done, how would I have liked figuring in the Police Courts? Curiously, he did have influence with the hospital, which shall be nameless. He did get a bed there for 'Enrietter the next morning. It may be that he had learned by experience the convenience to himself of having a hospital, as it were, in his pocket. But the arrangements were by letter; he did not risk a second meeting, and I asked 'Enrietter no questions. For my own satisfaction, I went with her to the hospital: a long, melancholy drive in a four-wheeler, 'Enrietter with ghastly face, more dead than alive. I delivered her into the hands of the nurses. I left her there, a bandaged wreck of the pretty 'Enrietter who had been such an ornament to our chambers. And that was the last I saw of her, though not the last I heard. A day or two later her sister came to pack up her belongings,--a young woman with a vacant smile, a roving eye, and a baby in her arms. I had only to look at her to know that she wasn't the sort of sister to force anything on anybody, much less on 'Enrietter. And yet I went to the trouble of reading her a little lecture. 'Enrietter's morals were beyond me, but I am not entirely without a conscience. The sister kept on simpering vacantly, while her eyes roved from print to print on the walls of the dining-room where the lecture was delivered, and the baby stared at me with portentous solemnity. Then, about three weeks after the sister's visit, I heard from 'Enrietter herself. She wrote with her accustomed politeness. She begged my pardon for troubling me. She had left the hospital. She was at home in Richmond, and she had just unpacked the trunk the sister had packed for her. Only one thing was missing. She would be deeply obliged if I would look in the left-hand drawer of the kitchen dresser and send her the package of cigarettes I would find there. And she was mine, "Very respectfully."