For the first moment June was too stricken to move. She stood spellbound, poised in mid-flight, hungrily staring. Then the desire for concealment seized her, and she was about to turn and steal back to the corner whence she had come, when Mercedes raised her eyes and saw her. She threw a short, quick phrase at Jerry, and he started and drew himself up. June moved forward, and as she approached them forced her lips into a smile and bowed. She was conscious that Jerry had flushed and looked angry as he raised his hat. But Mercedes enveloped her in a glance of fascinating cordiality, inclining her head in a graceful salutation.
A half-hour later June gained her room and sank into an arm-chair. For some time she sat motionless, gazing at the gray oblongs of the two windows with their shadowy upper draperies. As the look in Jerry’s face kept rising upon her mental vision, she experienced a slight sensation of nausea and feebleness. But even in this hour of revelation she kept whispering to herself,
“He couldn’t! He couldn’t! He couldn’t have the heart! He couldn’t hurt me so!”
The few poor memories she had of moments of tenderness between them, the meager words of love that she had regarded as binding vows, rose in her mind. It had seemed to her he could no more disregard them than she could. She thought of herself responding to the love of another man—of its impossibility—and sat bowed together in her chair, for the first time catching a revealing gleam of the difference in their attitudes. Then the memory of Mrs. Newbury came to her, and with it a strengthening sense of his unbreakable obligation. Nearly three years ago, when June had first heard of this, it had seemed so degraded and repulsive that she had shrunk from the thought of it. Now, sitting lonely in the twilight, her eyes staring at the gray panes, she recalled it with relief, found it a thing to be glad of, to congratulate herself upon. The city had put its stain upon her. Her maidenly fastidiousness was smirched with its mud.
Plunged in these dark thoughts she did not hear the door open, nor see Rosamund’s head gently inserted. It was not till the rustling of her advancing skirts was distinct on the silence that June started and turned. The last light of day fell through the long window on the younger girl’s face, rosy with exercise, and shining with a new happiness. She paused by June’s chair and stood there, looking down. For the first time in her life the preoccupation of her own affairs prevented her from noticing her sister’s sickly appearance.
“It’s all arranged, June,” she said in a low voice.
“Arranged!” repeated June, looking up quickly, her ear struck by something unusual in her sister’s tone. “What’s arranged?”
“Everything between Mr. Harrower and me. We’re—we’re—”
“You’re engaged?” said June, almost solemnly.
Rosamund, looking into the upturned face, nodded. There was a sudden pricking of tears under her eyelids, an unexpected quivering of her lips. She bent down and laid her cheek against her sister’s, and in the dim room they clung together for a silent moment, one in the first flush of her woman’s happiness, the other in the dawning realization of her desertion.