The story would not have taken in a child, but as it suited me to give her another trial, it was easier to make-believe to believe. Before the interview was over I ventured a little good advice. I had seen too often the draggled, filthy, sexless creatures drink makes of women in London, and 'Enrietter was worth a better end. She listened with admirable patience for one who was already, as I was only too quickly to learn, so far on the way to the London gutter that there was no hope of holding her back, as much as an inch, by words or kindness. The next Sunday 'Enrietter stayed in and went to bed sober. It was the day after--a memorable Monday--that put an end to all compromise and make-believe. I had promised to go down to Cambridge, to a lunch at one of the colleges. At the English Universities time enters so little into the scheme of existence that one loses all count of it, and I was pretty sure I should be late in getting home. I said, however, that I should be back early in the afternoon, and I took every latch-key with me,--as if the want of a latch-key could make a prison for so accomplished a young woman as 'Enrietter! The day was delightful, the weather as beautiful as it can be in an English June, and the lunch gay. And afterwards there was the stroll along the "Backs," and, in the golden hour before sunset, afternoon tea in the garden, and I need not say that I missed my train. It was close upon ten o'clock when I turned the key in my front door. The flat was in darkness, except for the light that always shines into our front windows at night from the lamps on the Embankment and Charing Cross Bridge. There was no sign of 'Enrietter, and no sound of her until I had pulled my bell three or four times, and shouted for her in the manner I was taught as a child to consider the worst sort of form, not to say vulgar. But it had its effect. A faint voice answered from the ship's cabin upstairs, "Coming, mum." "Light the gas and the lamp," I said when I heard her in the hall. The situation called for all the light I could get. From the methodical way she set about lighting the hall gas I knew that, at least, she could not be reeling. Then she came in and lit the lamp, and I saw her. It was a thousand times worse than reeling, and my breath was taken away with the horror of it. For there she stood, in a flashy pink dressing-gown that was a disgrace in itself, her face ghastly as death, and all across her forehead, low down over one of the blue eyes, a great, wide, red gash.