June fell on the sofa, her face in her hands. She heard his step in the passage, then sharp on every stair as he ran down to the street. In the darkening room she sat trembling, her face hidden, alone in the empty house.
CHAPTER IV
A WOMAN’S “NO”
Rion Gracey called on June as the Colonel had suggested, called again the week after, and in a short time formed a habit of dropping in every Sunday evening. He generally found the Colonel there, and in the first stages of reopening the friendship the elder man had been very convenient in relieving the meetings of the constraint which was bound to hover over them. But as the spring Sundays passed and the constraint wore away, Rion did not so thoroughly appreciate the presence of his friend. With surprise at his own subtility—for the mining man was of those who go forcefully over obstacles, not around them—he discovered what evenings the Colonel did not dine with June and began to make his appearance then.
He generally found her alone. She had made no effort to enlarge her acquaintance, and after the wedding her father was constantly in San Francisco or at more congenial haunts in the town. It raised agitating hopes in Rion to see that she was openly and unaffectedly glad to see him. There was a confidence, a something of trust and reliance in her manner that—for him—had not been there before. He thought she had never been so winning as she was on these lonely evenings, when her face lighted at the sight of him, and her smile was full of a soft welcome, touched with girlish shyness.
Women like to think that the beloved member of their sex plays so filling and absorbing a part in the life of the enslaved man, that all other matters are crowded from his mind. The interests of business dwindle to the vanishing point, the claims of friendship have no place in a heart out of which all else has been pushed. Love, while it lasts, holds him in a spell, and then, if only then, the woman is a reigning goddess.
Rion Gracey was not of this order of man. He had loved June since his meeting with her at Foleys, but he had led a life so full of work and business, so preoccupied with a man’s large affairs, that there were periods of weeks when he never thought of her. Yet she had been and was the only woman he had ever truly cared for and ardently desired. Before his meeting with her women had been merely incidents in his onward career. When, during the summer at Foleys, he had come to know her, he had realized how different was the place she would have taken in his life from the transitory interests which were all he had so far known. Then, for the first time, he understood what a genuine passion means to a genuine man.
When she had refused to marry him he had left her sore and angry. But the crowded life in which he was so prominent a figure soon filled with vital interests every moment of his days. His wound was not healed, but he forgot its ache. He rigorously pushed the thought of her from his mind. She was not for him, and to think of her was weakness. Then he heard a rumor that Barclay was an admirer of hers, and he shut his mouth and tried harder than ever not to think.
But time passed and June did not marry. Jerry, given his freedom, married Mercedes. Rion, a man to whom small gossip was dull, a thing to give no heed to as one walked forward, heard none of the talk of Jerry’s change of heart. It filtered slowly into Virginia, which was across the mountains in another state, and occupied in a big way with big matters. Even Barney Sullivan, who was well primed with San Francisco gossip after Mitty’s return from visits, “down below,” did not mention to his chief anything of Miss Allen and Jerry Barclay.
When he heard she was coming to Virginia the love-obsession that the woman likes to believe in, came near taking possession of him. For a day or two he was shaken out of the current of his every-day life and found it hard to attend to his work. The thought of seeing her again filled this self-contained and masterful man with tremors such as a girl might feel at the coming of her lover. The first time he saw her on C Street he found it difficult to collect his thoughts for hours afterward.
The change in her, the loss of what good looks she had once possessed, did not diminish or alter his feeling. If he had been asked if he thought her pretty he would have honestly said he did not know, he had never thought about it. He did not know how old she was, nor could he cite any special points of beauty that his eye, as a lover, had noted. Her only physical attribute that had impressed him was her smallness, and this he had noticed because in walking with her, her head only came to a little above his shoulder, and he was sometimes forced to bend down to hear her.