Harriet and the Piper

by Kathleen Thompson Norris

"Good-night, Nina!"

"Good-night!" snapped Nina, and the door slammed.

Harriet continued to move about for perhaps half an hour before Nina's odd manner recurred to her, on a wave of memory, and she seemed to hear again Nina's ungracious tone.

"He told her!" she said, suddenly. "She saw Royal, and he told her! Poor child--"

And she went to Nina's room, with a vague idea that she would sit beside the weeping girl for awhile, one heavy heart close to the other, even if no words could pass between them.

But Nina lay sleeping peacefully, and Harriet, after watching her for a few minutes, went back to her own room. She went to the open window, and stood staring absently out at the dark summer night, the great branches of the trees moving in the restless wind, and the oblong of dull light that still fell from the library window.

She could not see the horror as Richard saw it: she could not see herself as only a mistaken woman, a woman with youth, beauty, and intelligence pleading for her, one problem more in his life it is true, but only one among many, and not the greatest. She did not see him as he saw himself, his family as the somewhat troublesome, and yet quite understandable, group of selfish human beings in whose perplexities he had always played the part of arbiter.

To Harriet the thing loomed momentous, unforgivable, incalculable. It assumed to her the proportions of a murder. Bigamy, perjury, deceit--what hadn't she done! Richard, in her estimation, was not what he thought himself, a somewhat ordinary man in the forties whose life had already held poverty and disillusionment and wholesome disappointment, whose nature had been tempered to humour and generosity and philosophy; to Harriet, he was the richest, the finest, the most deserving of men, and she the adventuress who had brought his name down to shame and dishonour.

Until two o'clock she was wretchedly busy in soul and body. When the last of her personal possessions was packed, and when she was aching from head to foot, she took a hot bath, and crept into bed.

But not to sleep. The feverish agonies of shame and reproach held her. She was pleading with Richard, she was talking to Nina--she was making little of it--making much of it--she was saying a reluctant "yes--yes--yes!" to their questioning.