The Colonel and Washington promised to procure all these things, 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 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.
The occasion did not pass without "improvement" by the leading journals; and Philip preserved the editorial comments of three or four of them which pleased him most.

These he used to read aloud to his friends afterwards and ask them to guess from which journal each of them had been cut.