Harriet and the Piper | Page 6

had had a nurse then, and
Harriet practised French with both the boy and girl, but now the nurse
was gone, and Ward could buy his own clothes, and Nina went to a
finishing school. So Miss Field had made herself useful in new ways;
she was quite indispensable now. The young people loved her; Richard
Carter occasionally said to his wife, "Very clever--very pretty girl!"
which was perhaps as close as he ever got to any domestic matter, and
Isabelle confided to her almost all her duties and cares. She patronized
Harriet prettily, and told her that she was too pretty to be getting up to
the thirties without a fiance, but Harriet only smiled her inscrutable
smile, and made no confidences on the subject of admirers. Nina,
insatiably curious, had gathered no more than that Miss Harriet's father
had been a college professor of languages, and that her only relative
was a married sister, much older, who had four children, and lived in
New Jersey.
She was a master of the art of keeping silent, this young woman, and
but for her beauty she might have been as inconspicuous as she
sincerely tried to be. But her simple gowns and her plainly massed hair
only served to emphasize the extraordinary distinction of her
appearance, and her utmost effort to obliterate herself could not quite
keep her from notice. Men raised their eyebrows, with a significant
puckering of the lips, when she slipped quietly through the halls; and

women narrowed their eyes, and looked questioningly at one another.
Isabelle, who was far too securely throned to be jealous of any one,
sometimes told her that she would make a fortune on the stage, but old
Mrs. Carter, who for reasons perfectly comprehensible in an old lady
who had once been handsome herself, detested Harriet, and said to her
daughter-in- law that in her opinion there was something queer about
the girl.
There was nothing queer in her aspect to-day, at all events, as she
demurely performed her duties at the tea table. To the occasional
pleasant and surprised "Hello, Miss Field!" she returned a composed
and unsmiling nod of greeting; for the rest, she poured and sweetened,
and conferred with the maids, in a manner entirely businesslike.
She was of that always-arresting type that combines a warm dusky skin
with blue eyes and fair hair. The eyes, in her case, were a soft smoky
blue, set in thick and inky black lashes, and the hair was brassy gold,
banded carelessly but trimly about her rather broad forehead. Her
mouth was wide, deep crimson, thin-lipped; it had humorous
possibilities all its own, and Nina and Ward thought her never so
fascinating as when she developed them; it was a mouth of secrets and
of mystery, of character, a mouth that had known the trembling of pain
and grief, perhaps, but a firm mouth now, and a beautiful one.
And in the broad forehead and the cheek-bones, just a shade high, and
the clearly pencilled brows and the clean modelling of the straight
young chin, there was a certain openness and firmness, a fortuitous
blending of form and proportion that would have made the head a
perfect model for a coin, a wonderful study in pastels. Looking at her,
an artist would have fancied her a bold and charming and
boyish-looking little girl, fifteen years ago, with that Greek chin and
that tawny mane; would have seen her sexless and splendid in her early
teens, with a flat breast and an untamed eye. And a romancer might
have wondered what paths had led her, in the superb realization of her
beautiful womanhood, at twenty- seven, to this subordinate position in
the home of a self-made rich man, and this conventional tea table on a
terrace over the Hudson. The smoky blue eyes to-day were full of an

idle content; the rounded breast rose and fell quietly under the plain
checked gown with its transparent frills at wrists and throat. Harriet
may have had her moments of rebellion, but this was not one of them.
She had been here for four years; she had held more difficult and less
well-paid positions for the four years before that; she had known
fatigue and ingratitude, and snubs and injustices, as every business
woman, especially in secretarial work, must know them, and she had no
quarrel with this particular occasion. Indeed, Nina's open adoration,
Ward's pointed attentions, and Isabelle's graciousness were making her
feel particularly cheerful, and more than offset the old lady's
disapproval, which was always more stimulating than otherwise to
Harriet.
"Nearly half-past five, Nina," she said, presently. "Go and change and
brush, that's a darling! You look rather tumbled."
Nina, reaching for a marron, obediently wandered away, and
immediately the empty chair beside Harriet