If Henriette prolonged her visits it was when Helen was writing him messages or he was writing to her. The process seemed to fascinate her.
"There is a question I want to ask," Phil wrote. "I have wondered about it a good deal. Helen never sends me any messages. She has not even shaken my hand and said hello to her seventeenth cousin. I can't see her new cartoons, but I remember all of her old ones. Tell me!"
Henriette had been looking over his shoulder as he wrote, Helen standing to one side till he had finished the first sheet. A number of times before he had asked where Helen was, and after a strange thrill that dried her throat she had replied:
"Drawing and in her ward. She inquires about you every day."
It was Henriette who reached for the first sheet this time. When he had finished the second sheet she passed both to Helen, with a studious inquiry on her face and without speaking. Then she looked around the room. It was empty, save for one form asleep on a cot in the far corner. Helen did not look up. She was motionless, staring at the sheets. He was hurt because she had never shaken his hand—she who had no thought except him! And, yes, he had thought of her for herself a little—a part of his kindness even when he was racked with pain. She folded the sheets gently, but without the stir of so much as an eyelash, when Henriette's voice brought her out of her daze.
"The hoax seems complete," said Henriette. "He is wholly convinced that you are I."
"Yes," said Helen. "You wished it, didn't you, and it has helped him—yes, he has said that it kept him alive!"
"Kept him alive!" repeated Henriette, in a monotone.
"Yes, you, not I, kept him alive!"
When people knew this! Henriette was thinking of the Lady Truckleford lot. There were pitfalls ahead which she had not foreseen.