If he had not been so suddenly stricken with worry and foreboding he could not have forborne a smile at this citing of Rosamund as a court of last resort.
“Yes, Rosamund said she couldn’t believe it either. If you knew him as we do you’d understand better. It’s all lies. People are always talking scandal in this place—I’ve heard more since I came here than I heard in the whole of my life before. It’s a dreadful thing, I think, to take away a man’s character just for the fun of talking.”
She had spoken rapidly and now paused with an air of suspended interest, which was intensified by her expression of eager questioning. The Colonel looked at her. In a dim way she was struck, as she had been before, by the intense melancholy of his eyes—sad old eyes—that told of a life unfulfilled, devastated, at its highest point of promise.
“June, dear,” he said in a low voice, “you’re not in love with this man?”
The color ran over her face to the hair on her forehead. The directness of the question had shocked her young girl’s delicacy and pride. She tried to laugh, and then with her eyes down-drooped, said in a voice of hurried embarrassment:
“No, of course not.”
He smiled in a sudden expansion of relief. All was well again. In his simplicity of heart it did not occur to him to doubt her.
CHAPTER IV
DANGER SIGNALS
Jerome Barclay lived with his mother in a new house on Taylor Street, near Jackson. They had only been there a short time. Before that South Park had been their home. But within the last year or two the fortunes of South Park had shown symptoms of decline, and when this happened Mrs. Simeon Barclay had felt that she must move.
Since her arrival in San Francisco in the early fifties, Mrs. Barclay had made many moves. These were not undertaken because her habitats had been uncomfortable, but because the fashionable element of the city had shown from the first a migratory tendency which was exceedingly inconvenient for those who followed it. Mrs. Barclay had followed it assiduously from the day she had landed from the steamer, and had in consequence lived in many localities, ranging from what was now Chinatown and in the fifties had been the most perfectly genteel and exclusive region, to the quietly dignified purlieus of Taylor Street.