“Mrs. Carter!” Bottomley and Pilgrim were beginning to call her so; she must sign checks as “Harriet Carter” now, she must say “by Mrs. Carter” in the shops, in a thousand little ways she must claim the dignity of being his wife.

And Harriet loved that distinction as if the title, the signature, and the dignity had never been vouchsafed to womankind before.  She had marvelled at her old self, that had taken “Miss” and “Mrs.” with cheerful indifference—­why, there was a worldwide chasm between the two!  Just to have this silly Saunders boy call her Mrs. Carter, as a matter of course, was to receive the accolade that gave her all her longed-for dreams in one.  It was the name of the man she loved, and, even though in a shadowy and unloved way, she liked the title that made her his.

But this dignity had its sting, too, and its responsibility.  Harriet’s soul had been growing during this past year.  She had thrown off the old shell of bitterness and discouragement, she had become ambitious again, even if only in the shallow, mercenary way that the life about her encouraged.  And then that had changed, too, and it had seemed to Harriet only good to serve and to be busy, to work out the difficult problem that was presented her with all the accumulated years of study and dreams, philosophy and courage, to help her.  Then love had come, sweeping all her old life away before it—­the flotsam and jetsam of discouraged years; what was ignoble and sordid and outgrown had still lined the river banks, it was true, but that was carried away now, the man she loved needed her, and by some instinct deeper than any dull male reasoning of his, had drawn her to him.

And now she owed him the truth, the whole, painful, humiliating story.  If she had told him months ago, so much the better and braver woman she!  She had not done so; she had been fighting Nina and his mother then; she had been afraid.  But she was not afraid now; he could forgive that long-ago girl of seventeen because her advocate was the woman of twenty-eight, the finished, cultivated, capable woman who had served him and his house, who must win his respect back because she loved him with every fibre of her being.

The words in which she would tell him came to her in a rush.  Why—­ it was nothing!  It was less than nothing.  In half an hour she would be back here in her room again, with all the past clean and straight at last, with the cloud gone, and with her whole soul singing with hope of the glorious future.  For a moment she knelt by her bed, her face in her hands.

She rose to her feet.  There was a tap at the door.

It was Bottomley.  “If you please, ’m—­Mr. Carter would be so much obliged if she would step down to the library, ’m.”  Harriet gave herself a parting glance, and followed the man downstairs.

“Courage!” she said to herself, with her hand on the library door.  “I’ve exaggerated and enlarged upon this thing too long!  I’ve imagined it into an importance that it really hasn’t at all!”