She mused about the little fortune, left most unexpectedly five years before to Nina and Ward by an uncle of their mother.  Edward Potter had been a bachelor, had been young when an accident flung him out of life, and made his niece’s children, the twelve-year-old Nina, and Ward at sixteen, his heirs.  The expectation had been that he would marry, that sons and daughters of his own would disinherit the young Carters.  But his affianced wife had married someone else, after awhile, and the fortune had gone on accumulating for Ward and for the girl whose eighteenth birthday was only a few months off now.  Harriet wondered if Royal Blondin knew about it.  Of course he knew about it!  Harriet had seen a check for one million dollars exhibited, under glass, among the wedding gifts of one twenty-year-old girl a few months ago.  She did not suppose that Richard Carter would do that for his daughter, even if he could.  But he would probably double Uncle Edward’s legacy, and the bride would begin her new life with a fortune that was no contemptible fraction of a million.

“And I am worrying about my responsibility to poor, dear little Nina!” the girl said to herself, with a rather mirthless laugh, as Nina herself came into the room.

Nina had been experiencing what were among the pleasantest hours of her life.  A school friend, Amy Hawkes, had come back with her from Francesca Jay’s tea, and the two had been prettily invited by Isabelle to join the family downstairs at dinner.  Coming at this particular moment, it had seemed to Nina that she was emerging from the chrysalis indeed.

But more than that.  Amy, who was romance personified, under a plain and demure exterior, had observed Nina’s long conversation with Royal Blondin, and had found an arch allusion to it so well received by Nina that she had followed up that line of conversation, almost without variation, ever since.  By this time the girls had confided to each other, over a box of chocolates in the deep chairs of the morning room, everything of a sentimental nature that had ever happened to them in their lives, and much that had not.  Amy was convinced that Mr. Blondin was just desperately in earnest, and that, for the sake of other aspirants, Nina ought not to trifle with him, and Nina, with blazing cheeks and tumbled hair, was assuming rapidly the airs of a sad coquette.

Amy was to sleep with Nina, and Harriet realized, as she superintended their fluttered dressing, that she, Harriet, would be obliged to go to their door five times, between eleven and one o’clock that night, and tell them that they must stop talking.  With the grave manner that always impressed young girls, and with a somewhat serious face, she was busying herself with their frills and ribbons, when from the bathroom, where Amy was drawing on silk stockings, and Nina had her toothbrush in her mouth, she was electrified by a chance scrap of their conversation.

“If I do mention it to Mother,” said Nina, rather thickly, “she will only scold me!  A man of his age—­she’d be furious!”