The Ocala Evening Star

HARRIET and the PIPER
By Kathleen Norris
Illustrations by Irwin Myers
Copyright by Kathleen Norris
But suddenly life became significant and thrilling again; he heard her voice, her laugh. She came swiftly and quietly out to them, smiling at him, settling herself in the chair beside his mother. She wore white, transparent, simple: there were coral beads about her firm young throat.
The dew of her deep sleep made her blue eyes wonderful; her cheeks were as pink as a baby's.
"Aren't the June days delicious?" she said. Richard studied her, smilingly, without answering. What would she say next, where would she move her eyes, or lay her white hand, he wondered. When she murmured to his mother in an undertone, he tried to catch the words.
"Did you have a good sleep?" Richard asked. She flashed him an eloquent look.
"Oh--the most delightful of my whole life!
Eight hours without stirring!"
The Hoyts arrived: a handsome mother and two equally handsome daughters. Harriet went to them gracefully; Richard saw that she was accepting good wishes. She took the callers to his mother, and filled their cups herself.
"She certainly is wonderful!" Richard said. He perfectly realized his own suddenly deepening feeling for her, but he dared not analyze it yet.
When Mrs. Hoyt hinted at a dinner, he took part in the conversation. "Thursday? Why not, Harriet? We have no engagement for Thursday?"
She flushed brightly, signaling to him that she had already indicated an excuse.
They had never dined together away from home. He need not think, said Harriet's anxious manner, that he need carry the appearance of marriage so far.
"But--but aren't Nina and I to be in town Thursday?" she ventured.
"Shopping. You can make that next week!" Richard said. He loved her confusion.
"Then we surely will! Thank you," she said to Mrs. Hoyt.
"Thursday, then, at eight!" the caller said, departing. Richard sauntered with them to their car, and returned to find Harriet half-scandalized, half-laughing.
"But do you want to dine with them?" she asked.
"Why not?" His smile challenged her, and she laughed hardily.
"I suppose there is no reason why not, Mr. Carter!"
"You can wear"--he gestured--"the black and goldy thing. They'll all be watching you!"
"Oh," she said, considering earnestly. "I have a much handsomer one than that. Blue and silver. You've not seen it."
"Blue and silver, then." Richard felt a distinct regret when the men he expected appeared. There was but one figure of any interest to him on the shady, flower-scented terrace, and that was a woman's figure in a white gown.
For two or three days he was conscious of a constant interest in her appearances and disappearances, a constant desire to please her. He was conscious of one mastering curiosity: he wanted to know just how Harriet regarded him. It seemed suddenly of supreme importance. He thought of it in his office, and smiled to himself during important business conferences, wondering about it. It seemed incredible to him, now, that his experiences of the past year had been so largely concerned with Harriet. His wife's companion, his daughter's governess, his own capable and dignified housekeeper, the woman he had so hastily married, all seemed a different person, a quite visionary person, with whom just such business-like arrangements had been possible.
But Harriet was beginning to seem to him a stranger who possessed at once the most mysterious and child-like, the most beautiful and the most baffling personality that he had ever known. He made excuses to go home early, just to catch glimpses of this wife who was not his wife. That he had ever taken a fatherly, advisory tone with this woman was unbelievable: her mere approach made him catch his breath and lose his coolness. He had walked into her room--he had patronized her--he had asked her casually to marry him as if she had been fifty, and as plain as she was lovely!
Richard shuddered as he thought of it. He made constant efforts to engage her in personalities, but she evaded him. There was a real thrill for him in the quiet dinner at the Hoyts'.
Mrs. Carter, said slow old bewhiskered John Hoyt, was an extremely pretty woman. "My wife"--Richard in answering called her that--"looks particularly well in an evening gown." Indeed she looked exquisite in the blue and silver dress, laughing--still with that adorable mist of strangeness and shyness about her--with her neighbors at the table and afterward in the drawing room, waving her silver fan slowly while Freda Hoyt, who quite obviously adored her, whispered her long confidences.
Coming home in the limousine they had neighbors with them, old Doctor and Mrs. Carmichael, so he might not have the word alone with her for which he had been longing all evening. But he stopped her in the wide, dim hallway when they reached Crownlands.
"Tired?" he said, at the foot of the stairs.
"Not a bit!" There was an enchanting vitality about her.
She had slipped the thin wrap from her shoulders, and she turned to him her lovely, happy face.
"Did you want me?"
"I wanted to say something to you," Richard said, feeling awkward as a boy.
"In there?" She nodded, suddenly alert, toward the library.
"Why in there?" he asked, with a little husky laugh. His one impulse was to put his arms about her.
"I thought--bills, perhaps?" Harriet said, innocently. It was the third day of the month: he had often consulted her as to expenses before this.
"No," Richard said, with another unsteady little laugh. "It wasn't bills. I was just wondering--if I had been very stupid," he said, taking one of her hands, and looking up from the fingers that lay in his to the face that now wore an expression a little frightened, despite the smile.
"Never with me!" Harriet said, in a low tone.
"Never so blind," Richard said, "never so matter-of-fact that I hurt your feelings? Nothing of that sort?"
"Always the kindest friend I ever had!" the girl answered, unsteadily, and with suddenly wet eyes.
"The--the most generous!"
He looked at her hand again, looked up at her as if he would speak. But instead, she felt her fingers pressed, and felt her heart thump with a delicious terror.
Bottomley came noiselessly, discreetly, across the hall. Instantly the woman in blue and silver was all the mistress.
"Is Mr. Ward in, Bottomley?"
"He dined at 'ome, Mrs. Carter."
"Oh, thank you! You may lock up, then. Good-night, Mr. Carter! Good night, Bottomley!"
She was gone. The blue-and-silver gown and the bunched folds of the furred coat vanished on the stairway landing.
The tall clock that she passed struck eleven.
And Richard, going into his library, realized that he was deeply and passionately in love.
He could think of nothing else--he did not wish to think of anything else.
Her face came between him and his book, her voice loitered in his ears, her precise, pretty phrasing, the laughter that sometimes lurked beneath her tones.
They were at the country club; Harriet chaperoning Nina, who was down at the tennis court with a group of young persons: Richard breathless and happy from a hard game of eighteen holes. He had encountered her on the porch, on his way to the showers, experiencing, as he did so, the thrill that belongs only to the unexpected encounter. Now they loitered at the railing, in the shade of the green awnings, as entirely oblivious of watching eyes as if the clubhouse were the library at home.
"Mrs. Carter," said a woman in bright yellow, coming up to them suddenly, "will you be a darling and come and talk to my French officer? The girls have all been practicing their Berlitz on him, and he's almost losing his mind! Dick," added this matron, who had linked her arm about Harriet's waist, "for heaven's sake go clean up! Can't you find time to talk to your wife at home? I've been watching you for five minutes, getting my arms burned simply black--will you come, Mrs. Carter? That's the poor soul, over there with Sarah. I don't know why I've had a French governess for that girl for seven years!"
"To save the life of a fellow creature," Harriet said in her liquid French. She went off, laughingly, in the other woman's custody; Richard looked after them a moment.
He saw them join the group of smiling girls and the harassed Frenchman: saw the alien's face brighten as Harriet was introduced. A moment later a boy with a tennis racket dashed up to them, and there was a scattering in the direction of the courts. The girls surrounded the boy, and streamed away chattering. The matron in yellow came back to her card table. And Harriet, unfurling her parasol, deep in conversation with the captured soldier, sauntered slowly after the tennis players. The afternoon sunshine sent clean shadows across the clipped grass: the stretched blue silk of Harriet's parasol threw a mellow orange light upon her tawny hair and saffron-colored gown.
Richard had a child's desperate wish that he was dressed, and might run after them.
But it was not at the tennis that he looked, twenty minutes later, when he reached the courts; although a brilliant play was being made, and there was a spattering of applause. His eyes instantly found Harriet's figure; she was still talking to the Frenchman, whose olive face was glowing with interest and admiration, and not more than eight inches, Richard thought, from her own, Harriet's own face wore the shadow of a smile, her lashes were dropped, and she was gently pushing the point of her closed parasol into the green turf. The chairs in which they sat had been slightly turned from the court.
Richard engaged himself in conversation with two or three men and women who were watching the youngsters' game, and presently found himself applauding his son for a brilliant ace. But after perhaps five minutes he walked quite without volition straight to Harriet's neighborhood, and she rose at once, introduced her new friend, and with a glance at her wrist, announced that she must go.
"Ward said he would drive me home the instant it was over," said Harriet, clapping heartily for the triumphant finish of the set.
"I'll drive you home!" Richard said instantly. "I've the small car."
"Friday night!" Harriet smiled. For Friday night was the night for a men's dinner and poker game at the country club, and Richard usually liked to be there.
"I can come back!" he persisted, suddenly caring more for this concession than anything else in the world. Without another word she agreed, bade her Frenchman what seemed to Richard an amiable good-by, and when the bowing officer disappeared turned with a reminiscent smile.
"And now what?"
"Where did you learn to chatter French that way?" Richard said, leading the way to the line of parked motors.
"Oh, we lived in Paris, old Mrs. Rogers and I," Harriet reminded him carelessly. And reaching the little rise of ground that lay between the clubhouse and the parking field, she stood still, looking off across the exquisite spread of fields and valleys, banded by great strips of woods, and flooded now by the streaming shadows and golden lights of the late afternoon. "What a day!" she said, filling her lungs with great breaths of the sweet air. "What an hour!"
"What I meant to say to you up there on the porch," Richard said, "when that--that woman interrupted--"
Harriet herself interrupted with a laugh.
"You say 'that woman' as if it was a bitter, deadly curse!" she said.
"Well--" They had reached the car now, and Richard was investigating the oil gauge and spark plugs under the hood. "Well, a woman like that breaks in--nothing to her!" he said with scorn, straightening up.
"Yes, but at a country club?" Harriet offered, placatingly, as she got into the front seat, and tucked the pongee robe snugly about the saffron-colored gown.
"I suppose so!" He got in beside her; there was a moment of backing and wrenching before they glided out smoothly on the white driveway.
"What I meant to say was this," he added suddenly, with a sidewise glance from his wheel. "I--I want you to realize that I appreciate the injustice--the crudeness of my rushing to you in New Jersey that Christmas day, I realize that we all have imposed on you--we've taken you too much for granted! I was in trouble, and I couldn't think of any other way out of it. But for any man to put a proposition like that to any woman--"
They were driving very slowly. He looked at her again, and met a wondering look in her beautiful eyes that still further confused him. He had been uncomfortably conscious of an odd confusion in touching upon this subject at all. Yet his mind had been full of it all day.
"I never felt it so, I assure you!" Harriet said with her lucid, friendly look. Richard felt that there was more to say, but realized that he had selected an unfortunate time for these confidences.
"I'm afraid I've been extremely stupid in the matter," he said, feeling for his words. "I've gone about it clumsily. To tell you the truth-- What does that boy want?"
It was Ward who was coming toward them across the green, with great springs and leaps, like some mountain animal.
(Continued Tomorrow)