The Colonel kissed her without speaking. At the doorway she turned and he waved his hand in farewell, but again said nothing.
June walked home through the soft gray damp of the late afternoon. As she looked up the lines of the long streets that climbed the hills, then sloped down toward the water front, she saw the fog blotting them out, erasing outlines, stealthily creeping downward till the distance looked like a slate blurred by a wet sponge. She remembered evenings like this in the first year of her San Francisco life, when she walked home briskly with the chill air moist on her face and her imagination stirred by the mystery and strangeness of the dim, many-hilled city, veiled in whorls and eddies of vaporous white. There was no beauty in it to-night, only a sense of desolation, cold and creepingly pervasive as the fog.
CHAPTER XIV
BED-ROCK
It took the Colonel a week to raise the money. He did it by selling the second of his South Park houses. The sale being a hurried one of property already well on the decline, the house realized less than, even in the present state of eclipse, it was worth. Five years before it had been appraised at fifteen thousand dollars. To-day the best offer he could get was nine.
He placed the money in the bank, the five thousand to stay there till June had decided more definitely on her movements. The remainder he would leave on deposit to his own account. June, in Europe, with five thousand dollars to her fortune, was not beyond the circle of his sense of responsibility. Some one must have money to give her when she needed it, as she certainly would. Her habits of economy had long ago been sloughed off with her faded cotton dresses and her country-made boots. Rosamund would be able to give her a home, but there must be some one somewhere upon whom she could make a demand for funds.
There was no need now for the Colonel to study his accounts. He knew them through and through. There was so little to know. The shut-down mine in Shasta and his mortgage on the Folsom Street house were all that was left to him. On the day that the sale of the South Park house was decided upon he wrote to Rion Gracey, asking him for a position, any overground position that the owners of the Cresta Plata thought he would suit. It was a hard letter to write. He was nearly sixty, and he had never, since his youth, asked any one for anything for himself. But one must live, “G. T.’s widow” had to be considered, not to mention June, living in England and having to be dressed as June should always be dressed.
Two days later the details of the sale were completed and the money deposited. Late that afternoon the Colonel, clad carefully in the shiny coat June had caught him brushing, went across town to Folsom Street. He had done what she had asked and all was ready.
The servant told him she was confined to her room with a bad cold, and after a few minutes’ wait in the hall, he was conducted up stairs, and found her lying on a sofa in the great front room, with its lofty ceiling and tall, heavily draped windows. The sofa was drawn up before a small fire that sent a fluctuating glow over her face, flushed with a slight fever, and burnished the loose coil of brown hair that crowned her head. She had a heavy cold, her voice was hoarse, her words interrupted at intervals by a cough. She was delighted to see him, sitting up among the cushions on which she reclined to hold out her hand, and rallying him on the length of time since his last visit.
“But I’ve been busy,” he said, drawing a chair up to the foot of the sofa, “busy over your affairs, young woman.”
“My affairs,” she answered, looking puzzled; then with sudden comprehension, “Oh, the money!”