and then took their sorrowful leave, a great deal more affected than the criminal was, apparently, by her situation.
The Colonel told the matron as he went away that if she would look to Laura's comfort a little it shouldn't be the
PROMISED PATRONAGE.
worse for her; and to the turnkey who let them out he patronizingly said,
"You've got a big establishment here, a credit to the city. I've got a friend in there—I shall see you again, sir."
By the next day something more of Laura's own story began to appear in the newspapers, colored and heightened by reporters' rhetoric. Some of them cast a lurid light upon the Colonel's career, and represented his victim as a beautiful avenger of her murdered innocence; and others pictured her as his willing paramour and pitiless slayer. Her communications to the reporters were stopped by her lawyers as soon as they were retained and visited her, but this fact did not prevent—it may have facilitated—the appearance of casual paragraphs here and there which were likely to beget popular sympathy for the poor girl.
