“I won’t go anywhere!” sobbed Nina, wildly, turning for flight, “because I’m going to kill myself!”

Harriet only waited long enough after her dramatic exit to give Richard a reassuring nod.  Then she hurried after Nina.

The girl was sobbing on her bed, and for awhile she answered Harriet’s soothing touch of voice and hand only with angry jerks.  Then they fell to talking, and Nina confided for the first time fully in the older woman.  Royal’s letters, his exquisite cards, sent with flowers, the poems he had written her; here they all were.  Harriet sympathized, sighed, and consoled her affectionately.  Presently she was able to suggest a new thought to Nina, one that could not but be palatable to the girl’s hurt spirit.

“You see, you’re only seventeen, Nina,” Harriet said.  “The age when most girls are still in the schoolroom, long before they have affairs!  Well, you’re not interested in college, so that ought to give you three or four clear years of girlhood.  You’re bound to have other affairs, you’ve proved that!  You go to South America—­ perhaps there is some interesting man on the steamer; you go to Canada—­to California, the world is yours.  Now, Royal is different.  He is an experienced man of affairs; he will always have an attraction for women, and they for him.  You aren’t his match, now, Nina.  In a few years you may be—­”

“I’m not jealous!” Nina said, proudly.  But Harriet smiled.

“Yes, you are jealous.  You wouldn’t be a real true woman if you weren’t!” she accused.  A reluctant dimple tugged at Nina’s pouting mouth.  She did not dislike the idea of potential despotism, of the travelled, experienced woman of the world, confident of her charm.

“If I offered a check to Royal, do you suppose he’d accept it!” she remarked, after dark musing.  She was sitting on the edge of her bed now, and Harriet was brushing her hair.

“If you really are worried about his business affairs, Nina, why not try it?” Harriet suggested, sensibly.  To this Nina returned a pouting: 

“I’m perfectly willing to try it!” And as a great concession she added with a sigh, “And I’ll tell him what Father thinks!”

“Now you’re talking like a woman who has herself well in hand!” Harriet said, approvingly.  “When are you to see him?”

“He’s coming over especially to see Father to-morrow,” Nina said.  “I suppose I might as well go down,” she added, eyeing herself gloomily in her mirror, “for Ward and that boy seem absolutely at a loss for amusement!”

“And I’ll be down presently,” Harriet said.  But when Nina was gone she walked slowly to her own dressing table, and sat down, and regarded herself steadily, and with heavy eyes.  Unexpectedly, here between the family dinner and the early going to bed, on a June evening, a crisis in her life was confronting her, and she knew that she must meet it.

Ward’s guest was only the young Saunders boy, who had been with them constantly last summer, and who was of absolutely no significance in their lives.  And yet Harriet had been introduced to him all over again as “Mrs. Carter”—­there was no halfway, in the eyes of the world at least, in this relationship of hers with Richard, and she must begin to take her place in the family.