o ruin her--and all that;
indeed, her mood was most receptive to the furtherance of Henriette's
plans. The ten-dollar bill was soothing, and indicated that my mistress
was a "foine woman" and "surely Norah would come 'round in the evening
to ask her aid."

"It's ruined I am unless somebody'll be good to me and give me a
riference, which Mrs. Innitt, bad cess to her, won't do, at all, at
all," she wailed, and then I left her.

She called that night, and two days later was installed in the Van
Raffles's kitchen.

A new treasure was added to the stores of our loot, but somehow or other
I have never been happy over the successful issue of the enterprise. I
can't quite make up my mind that it was a lady-like thing for Henriette
to do even in Newport.

XII

THE LAST ADVENTURE

I am bathed in tears. I have tried to write of my sensations, to tell
the story of the Last Adventure of Mrs. Van Raffles, in lucid terms,
but though my pen runs fast over the paper the ink makes no record of
the facts. My woe is so great and so deep that my tears, falling into
the ink-pot, turn it into a fluid so thin it will not mark the paper,
and when I try the pencil the words are scarce put down before
they're blotted out. And yet with all this woe I find myself a
multi-millionaire--possessed of sums so far beyond my wildest dreams of
fortune that my eye can scarce take in the breadth of all the figures.
My dollars coined into silver, placed on top of one another, would form
a bullion tower that would reach higher into the air than fifteen
superimposed domes of St. Peter's placed on top of seventeen spires of
Trinity on the summit of Mont Blanc. In five-pound notes laid side by
side they'd suffice to paper every scrap of bedroom wall in all the
Astor houses in the world, and invested in Amalgamated Copper they would
turn the system green with envy--and yet I am not happy. My well-beloved
Henriette's last adventure has turned my fortune into bitterest gall,
and plain unvarnished wormwood forms the finish of my interior, for she
is gone! I, amid the splendor of my new-found possessions, able to keep
not one but a hundred motor-cars, and to pay the chauffeur's fines, to
endow chairs in universities, to build libraries in every hamlet in the
land from Podunk to Richard Mansfield, to eat three meals a day and
lodge at the St. Regicide, and to evade my taxes without exciting
suspicion, am desolate and forlorn, for, I repeat, Henriette ha