“And now,” he said, drawing a chair up beside her, “let’s hear what it is you hadn’t the courage to tell to your Uncle Jim? Have you been robbing or murdering, or what?”
“I’ve been staying in the house mostly, looking out of the window. I—don’t feel much like going out. I—oh, Uncle Jim,” she said, suddenly turning her head as it rested on the chair-back and letting her eyes dwell on his, “I’ve been so miserable!”
He leaned forward and took her hand. He had nothing to say. Her words needed no further commentary than that furnished by her appearance. With the afternoon light shining on her face, she looked a woman of thirty, worn and thin. All the freshness of the young girl was gone.
“That’s what I’ve come to talk about,” she said. “I don’t feel sometimes as if I could live here any longer, as if I could breathe here. I hate to go out. I hate to meet people. Every corner I turn I’m afraid that I may meet them—and—and—then—” her voice suddenly became hoarse and she sat up and cleared her throat.
For a moment a heavy silence held the room. The Colonel broke it.
“How would you like to go up to Foleys for a while?” he suggested. “Your father was telling me the other day that the superintendent of the Barranca had a nice little house and a very decent sort of wife. You could stay there. It would be a change.”
“Foleys!” she echoed. “Oh, not Foleys! It’s too full of the past before anything had happened. No, I want to go away, far away, away from everything. That’s what I came to talk about. I want to go to Europe.”
“Europe!” he exclaimed blankly. “But—but—you’d be gone for months.”
“Yes, that’s just it. That’s what I want—to be gone for months, for years even. I want to get away from San Francisco and California and everything I know here.”
The Colonel was silent. He felt suddenly depressed and chilled. San Francisco without June! His life without June! The mean little room with its hideous wall paper and cheap furniture came upon him with its true dreary strangeness. The city outside grew suddenly a hollow place of wind and fog. Life, that was always so full for him, grew blank with a sense of cold, nostalgic emptiness. He had never realized before how she illumined every corner of it.