They left the Pier and threaded through the crowds on the still frequented Promenade. He led her to her lodgings, an apartment house dingy even for a back street in a seaside town. He imagined that would be the end of their meeting, but at the house there was a surprise. By some lightning spread of gossip, the landlady had learned of happenings at the Pier Pavilion, with the result that she stood truculently in the front hall, hips firm and lips tightened. “I’ll have no sooicides in my house!” came her immediate greeting, as David helped the girl up the flight of steps to the porch. “No turning the gas on here and blowing us all up while we’re in our beds! Here’s your bag — you can take it and go! And if that’s your gentleman friend I hope he knows all about you!”

David didn’t know what to do, and he was a little upset, as he always was by scenes outside the realm of pathology. He could pacify a frenzy within the walls of Midchester County Asylum, but he shrank from the less tolerable madness of those whom the world called sane. He could think of nothing but to take the girl away immediately, which meant to walk to the cab stand at the corner and drive somewhere; but of course the cabman wanted an address, and the only one that occurred to him on the spur of the moment was the Victoria Hotel, where he intended to stay himself, and where he had occasionally stayed before. So they drove there, the girl by this time so desperately tired that she could hardly stand up in the hotel lobby. The clerk, recognizing David but not quite sure of his name, appraised his companion curiously, wondering if she had drunk too much and if she were his wife. It was all rather odd, but none of his business; but he thought it odder still when, on being presented with the register for signature, David had to question the girl before he wrote her name. Then he wrote “Leni Krafft.” He asked for two single rooms, and the clerk allotted them on the same floor. Then the doctor asked for a trunk call to Calderbury and the clerk overheard him explaining why he couldn’t return home that night. But (or so at any rate he said afterwards) the clerk suspected that the doctor might not be giving the right explanation.

David did not sleep well. He was puzzled and a little perturbed. He knew that in the morning he could not simply pay the two bills together, say good-bye, and never see the girl again. There comes a degree of contact where one cannot, without injury, untwist the fateful into the casual. He knew she had hardly any money. He knew she had no friends. He knew she had no job, and could not get one till her wrist had mended, and that she spoke only a few words of English. He knew her state of mind, and what it had so recently led her to attempt. He alone knew all these things about her. And he knew other things from experience, for there were folks in Calderbury, happy enough now, who at one time would have put an end to themselves but for his patient soothing of ruffled minds. It wasn’t that he ever argued much or was noisily cheerful; it was something that came to him instinctively out of his own feeling for the terror and beauty of life, something harmonious where all else made discord. And he had also the professional interest that every doctor takes in his patient, a desire to finish a job and pass on to another job. It was hard to know what to do in a case like this, but he well knew that to do nothing at all would be impossible for him.