Richard, catching the look, was perhaps unconsciously cheered by it.  Even at forty-four, and under his present difficulties and harassments, he must have been dead not to be refreshed by the vision of earnest youth and beauty that was so near him in the tempered summer light of the great library.

“Thank you!” he said, as if she had spoken.  “There is one more thing, Miss Field,” he added, idly rumpling his papers again, and then moving his fine hand to his thick brown hair, whose shining order he rumpled, too.  “About this man Blondin.  Do you know anything about him?”

A more direct shot at her innermost fastnesses could hardly have been made.  Robbed of breath and senses by the suddenness of it, and with dry lips, Harriet could only falter a repetition: 

“Know anything about him?”

“I don’t know much, and what I do know I don’t like,” Richard continued, noticing nothing amiss in her manner, perhaps because he was so deeply absorbed in what he was saying.  “He’s a handsome fellow; he knows his subject, I guess.  He’s the modern substitute for the mediaeval minnesinger,” he added, “a sort of father confessor—­and the women like to talk to him!  But I don’t like him.  Now, I don’t know how he feels to Nina, or she to him, but as you know, she will come into her uncle’s fortune in a few months, unless the trustee, who is myself, decides to defer payment for another three years.  I merely want to say that it might be as well to intimate to this young fellow that there are conditions under which I would see fit to defer it, and anything that brought him into that connection would—­well, would constitute one!”

“I didn’t know of that!” Harriet exclaimed, in such obvious relief that the man smiled involuntarily.

“Then you agree with me?” he asked, eagerly.

Here in the sombre sweetness of the library, with the man she admired and respected above all others looking to her for confidence and counsel, what could she say?  Even had Royal Blondin been present, Harriet might have cast every secondary consideration to the winds as readily.  As it was, she could only tell him the truth.

“Oh, yes—­yes!  I told Ward that I would rather see Nina dead!”

“Why do you say so?” Richard asked.  “Now, I’ll tell you why I do,” he added, as Harriet was, not unnaturally, groping for definite phrases, “I’ve been watching this man.  I had his record looked into.  There’s nothing extremely bad in it—­he seems to be a gentleman adventurer.  But there was an affair several years ago, his name mixed into some divorce, and it developed then that he holds rather peculiar ideas about free love, natural relationships—­I needn’t go into that.  I don’t want him mixed up with my family.  I’m going to speak to Ward about it, warn him that his sister’s happiness mustn’t be risked by having the fellow about at all.  Meanwhile, you can take it up with Nina.  Just let her see that she isn’t the only girl who has ever listened to him reading ‘In a Gondola.’  You might hint that there was a good deal of talk about him five or six years ago; there was a Swedish woman—­I didn’t get the details!—­but I imagine trial marriage comes pretty close to it.  You’re tired,” said Richard, abruptly.