But as his holdings advanced in value, as he saw himself day by day loosening the bonds that bound him to his employers, his wife, a society of which he was weary, his restraint was relaxed. His words grew less fluent, his pose of friend changed to that of the man on whose conversation moments of silence fall while he looks with ardent eyes on a down-drooped face. June made a last desperate stand, tried with despairing struggles to draw back from the fate closing around her. Even now she did not realize how close she was to the edge of the precipice. But Jerry did. He knew they were standing on its brink.
One evening, early in September, June and the Colonel were sitting together at dinner in the dining-room of the Murchison mansion. Allen had gone to San Francisco for a week, and the Colonel was to dine with June every evening till his return. He spent as much of his time as possible with the young girl in these lonely days. Even Mitty Sullivan and the baby were away, having gone to Lake Tahoe for two months. Thus the one house to which June could constantly go and be cheered by the society of a woman friend was closed to her.
Since Rosamund’s wedding the Colonel had seen a distinct change in his darling. He set it down to grief at her sister’s departure. She was pale and listless. The joy of youth had gone completely from her. Of late he had noticed that she was often absent-minded, not answering him if he spoke to her. He worried over her with a man’s helplessness in situations of complicated feminine tribulation. Allen, drunk half of the time, absent the other half, was no guardian for her. Yet the Colonel could not take her away from him. He was her father. Sometimes when he let himself build air castles over his after-dinner cigar, he thought that perhaps Allen might die or marry again and then June would come to him and be his daughter. He would watch over her and lap her round with love and tenderness, and far off, in a rosy future, he would see her giving her hand to Rion, the man, he told himself, that Providence had made for her.
Her appearance to-night shocked him. She was pallid, the delicate blue blur of veins showing on her temples, her eyes heavy and darkly shadowed. He noticed that she ate little, crumbling her bread with a nervous hand, and only touching her lips to the rim of the wine glass. She was unusually distraught, often not answering the remarks he made to her, but sitting with her lids down, her eyes on her restlessly moving fingers.
Toward the end of dinner a sense of apprehension began to pervade him. If she continued to droop this way she might contract some ailment and die. Her mother had died of consumption and consumption often descended from parent to child. He knew now that her likeness to Alice went deeper than mere outward form into the secret springs of thought and action. It was one of those careful and perfect reproductions of type to which Nature is now and then subject. June was her mother in looks, in character, in temperament. It was so singularly close a resemblance that it seemed but natural to dread for her the disease that had killed the elder woman.
“You feel perfectly well, Junie?” he inquired, trying to speak easily but with anxious eyes on her.
“Well?” she repeated. “Oh, quite well! I’ve never been better. What makes you ask?”
“I thought you looked pale, paler than usual, and seemed out of spirits. Are you out of spirits, dearie?”
“I’ve not been very cheerful since—since—Rosamund left.”
She concluded the sentence with an effort. The half-truth stuck in her throat. She had been in a state of confused misery for days, but the pain of her deception pierced through it.