The spontaneous response in her tone made Richard Carter laugh.

“I’ve had something on my mind for two months,” he said, “to-day I ran into the fellow I thought was going to make the trouble—­we had lunch together, and everything was settled up as calm as a June day!  I feel ten years younger than I did at this time yesterday!  What made me think of it was that I had it on my mind that you and Nina and the bags would be a crowd in this car when I came out to my mother’s a few minutes ago.  I was figuring on sending the bags on to-morrow, and so on and so on—­”

“It’s often that way,” Harriet smiled.  “Only money trouble really seems to have a solid, tangible form,” she added, thoughtfully.

“Combined with some other,” he surprised her by answering quickly, as if he were quite at home with his subject.  “If there isn’t sickness—­or drink—­”

“Oh, you can’t say that, Mr. Carter!” Harriet was at home here, too.  “Everybody who is respectable and hard working and sober doesn’t get rich—–­”

“No, not rich!” He was really interested.  “But our contention isn’t that riches are the only happiness, is it?” he countered.

“No, but I say that money trouble is a very real thing,” she answered, quickly.

“There is a golden mean, Miss Field, between being rich and being poor!” he reminded her.

“I suppose I am rather bitter,” Harriet said, enjoying this confidence more than she could stop to realize, “because I have just been to see my sister in New Jersey.  She has four children, pretty well grown now, and her husband is really a good man, and a steady man, too—­he is a sort of Jack-of-all-trades on a Brooklyn newspaper.  I suppose Fred is paid sixty dollars a week, and they save on that!  But—­”

“She’s unhappy, eh?” asked the man, with a sidewise glance.

“Linda?” Harriet laughed ruefully.  “No, she’s not!  She’s too happy,” she said, with a little laugh that apologized for the sentiment.  “She washes and cooks and plans all day and all night!  I’m the one who worries.  It makes me sad to have her work so hard for so little—­”

She sensed his lack of sympathy, and stopped short, in a little vague surprise.  There was a brief silence while he took the car skillfully through a somewhat congested side street, then they were leaving the hot city behind, and the fresh breath of the river was in their faces.  Harriet, in self-defence, sketched the Davenport home for him in a dozen sentences.

“You might tell your brother-in-law, from me,” Richard Carter said, presently, “that there isn’t much that money will buy him!”

Harriet flushed.  She had had perhaps a dozen brief conversations with Richard Carter before to-day, but they had never touched so personal a note before.

“I sounded mercenary!” she said, a little uncomfortably.  “But I didn’t mean to be.  I suppose it is because I see so many things that money would do for my sister; I’d love so to have the children beautifully dressed and well educated.  Little Pip, raking the yard to-day!—­when he ought to be in some wonderful Montessori school!”