“I’m chaperoning little Lettice Graham for a week,” she began, in the delightful voice upon which Harriet had modelled her own.  “But Lettice is trying her little arts upon Ward Carter.  Dear boy, that!”

“Ward?  He is a dear!” Harriet said, innocently.

“No blushing?” Mary Putnam asked, with a smiling look.  The colour came into Harriet’s lovely face, and the smoky blue eyes widened innocently.

“Blushing—­for ward?” she asked.

Mrs. Putnam stirred her tea thoughtfully.

“I didn’t know,” she said.  “You’re young, and you know him well, and you’re—­well, you have appearance, as it were!”

Harriet laughed.

“Ward is twenty-two,” she observed.

“And you’re—?”

“I shall be twenty-seven in August.”

“Well, that’s not serious,” the older woman decided, mildly.  “The point is, he’s a man.  Ward has fine stuff in him,” she added, “and also, I think, he is beginning to care.  It would be an engagement that would please the Carters, I imagine.”

The word engagement brought a filmy vision before Harriet’s eyes, born of the fragrance and sunshine of the summer.  She saw a ring, laughter and congratulations, dinner parties and receptions, shopping in glittering Fifth Avenue.

“Perhaps it would,” she said, with a hint of surprise in her tone.  “They are really very simple, and always good to me!  But old Madame Carter,” she laughed, “would go out of her mind!”

“A boy in Ward’s position may do much worse than marry a lovely and sensible woman,” Mrs. Putnam said.  “Well, it just occurred to me.  It is your affair, of course.  But looking back one sees how much just the—­well, the lack of a tiny push has meant in one’s life!”

“And this is the push?” Harriet said, her heart full of the confusion and happiness that this unusual mood of confidence and affection on Mary Putnam’s part had brought her.

“Perhaps!” The smooth, cool hand touched hers for a second before Mrs. Putnam went upon her gracious way.  Harriet hardly heard the bustle and confusion about her for a few minutes.  She sat musing, with her splendid eyes fixed upon some point invisible to the joyous group about her.

To Nina, meanwhile, had come the most extraordinary hour of her life.  It had begun with the familiar and puzzling humiliations, but where it was to end the fluttered heart of the seventeen-year-old hardly dared to think.

She had sauntered to a green bench, under great maples, with Lettice Graham and Harry Troutt and Anna Poett.  And Joshua Brevoort had come for Anna, and they had sauntered away, with that mysterious ease with which other girls seemed to manage young men.  And then Harry and Lettice had in some manner communicated with each other, for Lettice had jumped up suddenly, saying, “Nina, will you excuse us?  We’ll be back directly,” and they had wandered off in the direction of the river, giggling as they went.  Nina had smiled gallantly in farewell, but her feelings were deeply hurt.  She hated to sit on here, visibly alone, and yet there was small object in going back to the absorbed groups nearer the house.