“Yes, that’s true!” she said, wiping a swollen face on the handkerchief Harriet supplied.  “But oh—­I don’t believe it, and my father will sue them for libel, you see if he doesn’t!  My mother’s the purest and sweetest and best woman alive—­and I’ll kill any one who says any different!”

“Oo—­oo, to see it in the paper there, right on the bed,” said Amy, in her reedy, colourless little voice, as Nina stopped suddenly.  “Oo—­oo, I thought Nina would die!” Nina began to cry again, but more quietly.  “I guess I had better go—­” Amy finished, plaintively.

“Oh, no!” said Nina in a choked voice, as she clung to her friend.  “No, darling! you stay with me.  Oh, I must go see my father, and my poor, poor grandmother!  Oh, Amy, perhaps you had better go, for my family will need me to-night.  My mother—!” said Nina, crying again.

She and Amy parted solemnly, with many kisses.

“It’s a thing that might happen to me, or to any girl,” said Amy, gravely.  Harriet had an upsetting vision of stout, high-busted Mrs. Hawkes, panting as she discussed the details of the Red Cross drive, but she was very sympathetic with the young girls, and even agreed with Nina, when Amy was gone, that it would be much more sensible to take her bath, and put on her white organdie, and then go find her father.

They dined almost silently, and were about to disperse quietly for the night, after an hour of half-hearted conversation in the drawing room, obviously endured by Richard simply for his mother’s sake, when Ward burst in.  He had travelled almost four hundred miles by motor that day, his face was streaked with dirt and oil, and ghastly with fatigue.  He went straight to his father.

“Say, what’s all this!” he said, in a voice hardly recognizable.  Harriet saw that he had been drinking.  “I got your wire, and we started.  I thought the Mater was sick, perhaps.  My God—­that worried me!” he broke off bitterly.  “Blondin came with me; we stopped on the road for dinner, and the man had a paper there.  Is that what you wanted me for—­I don’t believe it!  It’s a dirty lie, and the bounder that put that in the paper—­”

“I’m glad you came home, my boy,” Richard said.  “I’ve been waiting for you—­”

Harriet heard no more; she slipped from the room.  There were genuine tears in her own eyes now; for the boy had flung himself face downward against a great chair, and was crying.  All the household knew it; Harriet could read it in Bottomley’s carefully usual manner and quiet speech.  In the little music room across the hall Royal Blondin was waiting.

“This is a terrible thing!” he said, seriously.

“Oh, frightful!” Harriet agreed.  A rather flat silence ensued.  She seemed to have nothing to say to Royal now.

But she was not surprised when a moment later Nina came softly in, the picture of girlish distress, with her wet eyes and fresh white gown.