Ritz for tea at five as per promise," said Mr. William Raines as he walked away and left Mr. Peter Scudder, who was assisting the lady from Cincinnati to transport her very lovely dog to a handsome car which awaited her. She also had I promised to visit from that great Ritz-Carlton hotel and she smiled in sweet friendliness to me as I stood with the letter in my hand and watched all of the friends I had found upon that ship, depart and leave me with not a place to go. I stood for many minutes motionless and then my eyes perceived the letter in my hand. Surely it must be opened and read. It was from the wicked Uncle, I knew, but it might be that it was not of the cruelty that I had expected. It would excuse him no doubt from arrival in person for the expected greeting to his relatives, Pierre and myself.
"Go to it, Bob," I advised myself in the language I had heard Mr. Saint Louis use when he was forced to ask a nice lady, who danced with disagreeable heaviness, to trot the fox with him because of a friendship with his mother.
And this is the letter that my eyes read with astonishment, while both the good Nannette and small shivering Pierre sat with their eyes fixed upon my countenance:
"My dear nephew Robert:
"Your arrival in America at this time suits me exactly. I need you immediately in my business. If you had been the girl, instead of the little one, I would have had to dispose of you some way--even murder. I have no use for women. Leave the little crippled girl and her nurse, who I feel sure is an old fool, with my good friend Dr. Mason Burns, of 222 South 32nd St. He has cured more children of hip joint disease than any man in the world, and he will straighten her out for us and we can give her away to somebody. I've written him instructions. Leave her immediately and come down here to me on the first train. The deal is held up without you. Enclosed is a check for a thousand dollars. If you are like Henry you'll need it, but keep away from Broadway and the women. Come on, I say, by next train. Your uncle, Robert Carruthers. Hayesville, Harpeth."
"The Uncle of America has come to a confusion of the sex between Pierre and me from a careless memory and the writing of my hand, which is of a great boldness, but not to be easily read," I explained as I read the letter aloud to Pierre and Nannette.
It took me just one hour by the clock, sitting there on the pile of steamer wraps with the small Pierre in the hollow of my arm, to explain and translate the sense of that letter to old Nannette, and I feel sure she would have been sitting upon that spot yet immovable rather than let me depart from her if I had not put all of my time and force upon the picturing to her of a Pierre who could come down with her later to me in a condition to run through the gardens of Twin Oaks, which was the home of his American ancestors. With that vision constantly before her she let the porter and me insert her into a taxicab and extract her at the door of the small private hospital of the good Dr. Burns who was to perform the miracle for the back and hip of small and radiant Pierre.
"But what is it that I do to permit the jeune fille of my beloved mistress to depart into this city of wicked savages not attended by me? I cannot. Do not demand it!" were the words with which I left her arguing with that very sympathetic and sensible doctor of America. He had not noticed a confusion of sex was between Pierre and me and he had sent out the check of my wicked Uncle and procured the American money for me. Also he had given me a few directions that he appeared to think of a great sufficiency and had ordered a taxi to be in readiness for me.
"Nonsense, Nurse," he said to Nannette bruskly but not with unkindness when I had translated to him Nannette's weeping protests. "A great strapping girl like that can get down to the Harpeth Valley all right by herself. Nobody's going to eat her up, and from the size of the biceps I detect under that chiffon I think she could give a good account of herself if anybody tried. How like you are to what Henry was at your age, child, God bless you! I'd go to the station with you but I've
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