“I can’t keep this up!” she told herself, playing games with little convalescent Pip, walking over frozen roads with the girls, reading under the evening lamp.  “I can’t keep this up!  Twenty-seven, and a governess, and in love with a married man who does not know I am alive!” summarized Harriet, bitterly.  “I will simply have to forget it, and begin again, that’s all.”

And she meditated upon David, the excellent, steady, devoted David, who was Fred’s brother and a dentist in Brooklyn, and who gave the children wonderful holidays at Asbury Park.  It would make Linda and Fred very happy to have her change toward him:  they were a little hurt and silent about David.  He always went with them to the crowded beach where they spent July and August, had had a car this year, Linda told her sister, and had been “so popular.”

Harriet would look off from her book; David’s nearness did not hold the thrill, the shaking, the happy suffusion of colour that the most casual remembered glance of Richard Carter still possessed.  No, she was richer in her memory of Richard—­

“I think you’re a wonder!  Don’t you think Fred is a wonder!” Linda would say.  Fred’s precious bank-account had been almost wiped out now; he made evening calculations with a sharp pencil.  But what was a bank-account to a Pip coming downstairs on Christmas Day, shaky but gay, in his wrapper, and glad to be with the family again?

David was there, Christmas Day, and there was a fire and a tree, happy children everywhere, rosy little neighbours coming in to see the toys, snowy wet garments spread on the porch after church.  David took Harriet walking in the fresh cold air, a Harriet so beautiful in her furry hat and long coat, with her brilliant cheeks and her blue eyes shining under a blown film of golden hair, that Linda, as she basted the turkey in the hot kitchen, couldn’t help a little prayer that that would all come out “right.”

“But, Davy dear!” Harriet and David had stopped short in the exquisite, silent woods.  “There is a feeling—­a something that makes marriage right!  And I haven’t it, that’s all!”

“How do you know you haven’t?” he said, smiling.

“Well—–­” She looked up bravely; David knew her whole story.  “I’ve had it!”

“You don’t mean that old feeling ten years ago?  My dear girl, that wasn’t love!  That was just a little girl’s first feeling.  But look at Fred and Linda after seventeen years.  Why, it’s sacred—­it’s holy.  Harriet, if once you said you would, it would come.  Why, that’s the very proof that you’re as fine—­as sensitive as you are—­that you don’t feel it now.  But, Harriet,” his arm was about her now, his voice close to her ear “don’t let those years with rich people spoil you for the real thing, dear!  Think of our hunting for an apartment—­Fred and I haven’t Mother to care for now; I’ve some of her good old mahogany, we could pick out cretonnes and things—­think of next summer, all together, down at the beach!  Linda’s children—–­”