“Well, our bird has flown!” said the old lady.  Harriet could see that she was pleased about something.

“Gone home with Ward?” Harriet asked.  Madame Carter never shook hands with her; there was conscious superiority in the little omission.  She sank into a chair, and Harriet sat down.

“Ward and his friend, this Mr. Blondin,” Madame Carter said.  “A very interesting—­a most unusual man.  A very good family, too—­ excellent old family.  Yes.  Nina assured us that she had to wait and go home with her Daddy, but that—­” Madame Carter gave

Harriet a deeply significant smile—­“but that didn’t seem to please Somebody very much!” she added.  “So I told Nina I thought Granny would be able to make it all right with Daddy, and off the young people went.”

She rocked, with a benignly triumphant expression, and a complacent rustle of silken skirts.  Harriet, beneath an automatic smile, hid a troubled heart.  Royal was losing no time, Ward his innocent instrument, and this fatuous old lady of course playing his game for him!  Madame Carter had always spoiled Nina in something a trifle more defined and malicious than the usual grandmotherly fashion.  She had indulged the child in chocolates when the doctor’s prohibition of sweets was being scrupulously enforced by Isabelle and Harriet; she had permitted late hours and unsuitable plays when Nina visited her; she had encouraged her granddaughter in a thousand little snobberies and affectations.  And she had taken a mischievous pleasure in thwarting Harriet whenever possible, emphasizing the difference in her position and Nina’s, humiliating the companion whenever it was possible, in ways that were far less subtle than Madame Carter imagined them to be.

Harriet saw now that she was pleased and flattered by an older man’s apparent admiration of Nina; and that she would further the girl’s first definite affair in every way that lay in her power.  It was maddening; it was exasperating beyond words.  An honest warning would have merely flattered her with its implication of her importance; ah, no, Isabelle and Harriet might try to hold the child back—­but Granny knew girl nature better than either of them!

“Well, then, I must follow them home,” Harriet said, pleasantly.  “You don’t come back to-night?”

To this Madame Carter very pointedly made no answer; her plans were not Miss Field’s business.  She rocked on placidly, in her ornate, pleasant room, at whose curtained and undercurtained and overdraped windows the summer sunshine was battling to enter.  It was a large room, but seemed small because the rugs were two and three deep on the floor, and there was so much rich, dark furniture, so many lamps and jars and pictures and boxes and frames, handsome but heterogeneous treasures that must always remain in exactly the same positions.  The several tables were angled carefully, their draperies lay precisely placed, year after year; Harriet knew that all the