the first time that had happened since her debut more than four years before.
Then Mrs. Nelson took a quiet but capable hand in affairs. She was not the obvious "managing mother." w She provided for her girls the background of a hospitable home and an unfailing welcome, and let things take their course. It had been like a well oiled machine which runs as easily as a motor coasts down hill. Now there was method in the choice of guests at her famous Sunday night suppers and jolly small dinners. Harriet was well aware that it was through her mother's unflagging interest and clever aid that her fifth winter went by, and people were still talking of her popularity and saying how well she held her own against the younger set.
Sometimes the praise rankled, as when a married woman remarked to her:
"I said the other night at the theater that you are the only girl in town who is always invited to everything that comes."
"Not a very exciting suitor," laughed Harriet. "It was Judge Barnard, a friend of dad's, and deaf as a post, but I've always been fond of him."
"His big car seems to be at your disposal," teased the other; "and he's a widower."
Harriet felt suddenly sick. Judge Barnard, sixty-one years old! What did it matter to her whether he had two wives under the sod or one in the flesh?
One March morning she met Joe's mother on the street—a woman whom she had always admired.
"Good morning, Harriet. What do you think of Joe's offer?" Mrs. Hayes asked with characteristic directness.
"I—I haven't heard about it," Harriet stammered.
It suddenly occurred to her that there had been a longer lapse than usual between Joe's letters.
"Our cousin wishes him to stay there. He has taken a great fancy to Joe, and made him an excellent offer to go into his office. Of course, he always has the place with his father open to him, and now that we are growing elderly the Argentine seems a long way to one's only son; but, like all mothers, I want him to choose what is best for his advancement and happiness."
Harriet walked home in a daze. She found Joe's last letter and reread it. There was not a word of love in it. It might have been written to a maiden aunt.
One paragraph stood out in scorching letters:
They say the Chileans are the prettiest women in South America, but they must be peaches if they can beat some of the girls I met at that dance—the real Spanish type, eyes as big as brown velvet moons.
Harriet had laughed over that when she read it for the first time, and had forgotten it. Now it swept over her, pitiless as a tidal wave. Joe was going to stay away forever. He was going to marry a girl from Argentina or Chile—oh, it didn't matter if she were a Patagonian!
She, Harriet Nelson, was never to marry at all. She faced the inexorable, inescapable fact.
She was made for domesticity. She wanted to go into her own, own kitchen and make cakes and put up marmalade. She knew the very pattern of kitchen cupboard she would choose. Of course, other girls went to work and were satisfied in it, but she knew she would abominate an office or teaching school. The very thought of it choked her, terrified her. She liked a home, and fussing around the pantry, and embroidering table linen, and transplanting seedlings, and bathing babies.
Never to develop her own ideas in anything, from a vegetable garden to the furniture of a sun porch! Never to have one's own baby, and to keep it as sweet and fresh as a little warm rose! That had been in Joe's dreams, too. She remembered how his voice had trembled as he broke off:
"And maybe—"
Her father had given her a little money, the week before, for her birthday gift. She went straight to the telegraph office and spent her entire capital on a cable to Buenos Aires.
Please come home, Joe. I miss you.
Hallie.
IV
There was no answer. Joe's guardian angel must have been at his elbow, cautioning him not to cable. He caught the first available steamer, instead, but for weeks Harriet had lived in wretched uncertainty. The cable had never reached him, or it had reached him and he thought it kinder to take no notice of it, being infatuated with some designing South American girl!
When he appeared one morning, directly from the train, he found Harriet alone in
