“I’m afraid of what he’s going to say. Oh, please”—with as much urgency as the low tone employed permitted—“if he suggests that we go into the drawing-room to look at photographs or albums or anything, you come along, too.”
“But why?”
“Rosie, don’t be such a fool!” in an angry whisper.
Rosamund was about to retort with some spirit when the click of the iron gate caught her ear. She drew back the curtains and peeped out. A step sounded on the flagged walk and a tall, masculine figure took shape through the density of the fog-thickened atmosphere. She closed the curtains and looked at June with an unsmiling eye.
“You needn’t be afraid of being left alone with anybody,” she said. “Here’s Jerry Barclay.”
June drew back, her eyebrows raised into exclamatory semi-circles, an irrepressible smile on her lips.
“Rosamund,” called Allen from the table, “where’s the ash receiver? Gracey’s got nothing to put his ashes in but the blue satin candy box one of June’s young men gave her for Christmas.”
The entrance of Jerry Barclay a moment later had a marked effect upon the company. He was known to the four men and not especially liked by any one of them. The Colonel had begun to feel for him a sharp, disquieted repugnance. The one person in the room to whom his entrance afforded pleasure was June, and this she made an effort to hide under a manner of cold politeness.
An immediate constraint fell on the party which the passage of the evening did not dispel. Gracey was angry that the advent of this man whom he mentally characterized as “a damned European dandy” had deprived him of a tête-à-tête with June. He had not intended, as the young girl feared, to ask her to marry him. He had the humility of a true lover and he felt that he dared not broach that subject yet. But he had hoped for an hour’s converse with her to take with him on his journey as a sweet, comforting memory. Sullivan detested Jerry, whose manner he found condescending, turned from him, and began talking with an aggressive indifference to his host. But the Colonel was the most disturbed of all. What worried him was the difference between June’s manner to Jerry to-day, when others were present, and June’s manner to Jerry yesterday, when they had been walking alone on Van Ness Avenue.
By eleven o’clock they had gone and Allen having stolen to bed, the sisters were left together in the sitting-room. They were silent for a space, Rosamund moving about to put out lights, give depressed cushions a restoring pat, and sweep the ashes of the fire into a careful heap beneath the grate, while June idly watched her from the depths of an arm-chair.