“I think I have been.  But, my dearest girl, you’ll be in and out a dozen times before the real thing comes along!”

Nina had smiled inscrutably at this, and slightly diverted the conversation.

“Don’t you think it was awfully decent of Mr. Blondin to want to go off to the club to-night?  Oh, I thought he looked perfectly stunning when he looked at Father that way!  He told me to telephone the club to-morrow if I felt like just a quiet walk.  Of course I shan’t see any one for weeks, after this.  But he said some day when I’m in town with Granny he didn’t see why we couldn’t go over and have a cup of tea with him, even if we postponed the regular tea.  Do you?  He’s different from any one I ever knew.  He says I am different from any girl he ever knew.  Do you think I am?  I said I thought I was just like the others, except that I like to read poetry and have my own ideas about things, and that I couldn’t flirt, or wouldn’t if I could, and that the average boy just bored me.  I said that those things were sacred to me—­”

Sacred to her!  Long after the chattering voice was still, Harriet, out on the balcony, remembered the phrase and winced.  There would be small sacredness in the hour that gave Nina to Royal Blondin.  And yet, if in his cleverness he won her first tenacious affection, it would be a difficult thing to prevent.  Isabella, her natural protector, was gone; Richard saw nothing; the old lady was on the lovers’ side, and Ward also had been captivated by Blondin.  It was only Harriet, only Harriet, who saw and who understood.

Was he so bad?  She tried to ask herself the question honestly, and an honest shudder answered it before it was fairly framed.  Nearly twenty years Nina’s senior, with an interest that could not, he confessed, have existed except for the girl’s fortune, that was arraignment enough.  But there was more.  Harriet knew the smooth coldness, the contemptuous superiority that within a year or two would blast the youth and self-confidence of a dozen Ninas; she knew what his moral code was, a code that made desire and opportunity the only law, and that honoured passion as the crowning emotion of life.  She tried to picture Nina’s marriage, their early days together, the breakfast table, where the crude little girl blundered and floundered in conversation, her helpless devotion, that would annoy and exasperate him.  She saw Nina’s near-sighted eyes welling with hurt tears; Nina’s check book eagerly surrendered to win from her lord a few delicious hours of the old flattery, the old attention.  Harriet fancied Nina, poor, plain, obtuse little Nina, home again:  “But you don’t know how hard it is, Father.  He is never there any more—­he hardly ever speaks to me!”

“It would take a clever woman to hold him,” Harriet thought, “and it wouldn’t be worth a clever woman’s while.”

Nina-Ward-Royal-Richard.  The wearying procession began again.  Royal might treat her with honesty and honour.  He was not small in everything, and she had never done him harm.  But—­there might come the terrible moment when she had to face Richard with the confession.  Yes, she had known him before.  Yes, they had entered into a tacit compact.  Yes, she had kept from Nina’s father a secret that, while it might be unimportant, certainly should have been told him.