Nothing can be more full of the note of human desolation than an occupied house suddenly vacated. June passed from room to room feeling the silence as part of the depression that weighed on her. Through the windows she could see the wild, morose landscape, beginning to take on the hectic strangeness of tint that marked its sunset aspect. Its weird hostility was suddenly intensified. It combined with the silence to augment her sense of loneliness to the point of the unendurable. She ran down the stairs and out on to the curve of balcony which extended from the front door.
Some children were playing in the street below, and their voices came to her with a note of cheer. Leaning listlessly against the balustrade she looked up the street, wondering when her father would be back. She had ceased to note his comings and goings, but this evening she watched for his return as she might have done in her childhood. There was no sign of him, and might not be for hours. After the train left he would probably range about the town, whose night aspect he loved.
She turned her head in the opposite direction, and her eyes became suddenly fixed and her body stiffened. A man was coming down the street, swinging lightly forward, looking over the tops of the houses toward the reddening peak of the Sugar Loaf. There was only one man in Virginia with that natural elegance of form, that carriage full of distinction and grace.
For the first moment he did not see her, and in that moment June felt none of the secret elation that had been hers in the past at sudden sight of him. Instead, a thrill of repugnance passed through her, to be followed by a shrinking dread. She moved softly back from the balustrade, intending to slip into the hallway, when he turned his head and saw her.
The old pleasure leaped into his face. She saw that he pronounced her name. He flung a cautious look about him and then crossed the road. With his hand on the gate he gazed up and said, with something of secrecy in his air and voice:
“Have they all gone?”
June’s affirmative was low. Her repugnance had vanished. Her desire to retreat had been paralyzed by the first sound of his voice.
“And they’ve left you all alone?”
The tone was soft with the caressing quality that to Jerry was second nature when an attractive woman listened.
“Yes, they went to the station to see them off. I didn’t want to go, so I stayed,” she returned stammeringly.