The girl’s tired eyes flashed.

“There was no divorce!” she said, quickly.

“No divorce?” he echoed with a puzzled frown.

“I want to tell you about it!” she said.  But the tears would come again.  “I’m tired!” Harriet said, childishly, trying to smile.  “I’ve been up—­walking.  I couldn’t sleep!”

The consciousness that he had been able to forget the whole tangle, and sleep soundly, gave Richard’s voice a little compunction as he said: 

“You don’t have to tell me now.  We’ll find a way out of it that is easy for everyone—­”

“No, but let me talk!” Harriet, in her eagerness, laid her fingers on his wrist, and he was shocked to feel that they were icy cold.  “I want to tell you the whole thing—­I want you to understand!” she said, eagerly.  Richard looked at her in some anxiety; there was no acting here.  The rich hair was pushed carelessly from the troubled forehead.  She was huddled in the enveloping coat, a different figure indeed from his memory of the superb and angry girl of last night in the library lamplight.

“Mr. Carter, I never knew my mother—­” she began.  But he interrupted her.

“My dear,” he said, in a tone he might have used to Nina.  He laid his warm, fine hand on hers, and patted it soothingly.  “My dear girl, if you feel that you would like to go to that motherly sister of yours—­if you feel that it would be wiser—­”

“Oh, I am going to Linda at once!” Harriet said, feverishly, hurt to the soul.  “I had planned that!  But—­but won’t you let me tell you?” she pleaded.  She had framed the sentences a hundred times in the long night; they failed her utterly now, and she groped for words.  “I was only three years old when my mother died,” she said.  “Of course I don’t remember her—­I only remember Linda.  I was shy, my father was a professor, we were too poor to have very much social life.  I lived in books, lived in my father’s shabby little study really; I never had an intimate girl friend!  Linda was always good—­angelically good—­talking of the Armenian sufferers, and of the outrages in the Congo, and of the poor in New York’s lower east side—­she never cared that we were poor, and that we hadn’t clothes!”

“I know—­I know!” Richard’s eyes were smiling, as if he knew the picture, and liked it.

“Well, Linda married when I was ten, and Josephine came, and then Julia came.  I still lived for books and babies.  But, unlike Linda, I cared.”  Harriet’s whole face glowed; she looked off into space, and her voice had a longing note.  “I cared for clothes and good times!” she said.  “I adored the children, but I dreamed of carriages—­maids—­glory—­achievements!  I knew that other women did it—­”

“I remember feeling that way!” Richard commented, mildly, as she paused.