Mercedes, who liked gossip, had heard the story of Jerry Barclay’s complication with Mrs. Newbury, and of how it was popularly supposed to have prevented his marriage to June Allen. The busy scandal-hunters of the city had somehow unearthed the story that Jerry and June would have married had the former been free. Mercedes, with her woman’s quickness, guessed that June was the sort of girl who would remain constant in such a situation. But Jerry was a being of another stripe, a man of an unusual attraction for women and of a light and errant fancy. She had not met him half a dozen times when she came to the conclusion that his love for June was on the wane, his roving eye ready to be caught, his ear held, by the first soft glance and flattering tongue he encountered. Thus the way of protecting herself and of hitting back at one at least of the Allens was put into her hand. She did not care for Jerry, save as he was useful to her, though he had the value of the thing which is highly prized by others. She used every weapon in her armory to attract and subjugate him. Jerry himself, versed in the wiles of women as he was, was deceived by her girlishly open pleasure in his attentions, her fluttered embarrassment when he paid her compliments. His first feeling toward her was an unbounded admiration for her physical perfections, to which was added a complacent vanity at her obvious predilection for him. But the woman that he regarded as a naïve ingenue was a being of a more complex brain, a more daring initiative, and a cooler head than he had ever possessed. Vain and self-indulgent, the slave of his passions, he was in reality a puppet in the hands of a girl fifteen years his junior, who, under an exterior of flower-like delicacy, had been eaten into by the acids of rage and revenge. While he still thought himself a trifler in the outer court of sentiment he was already under her dominion. He thought of himself as taking an impersonally admiring interest in her when he was continually haunted by the thought of her, and hastened to spend his spare hours beside her, his eyes drinking in her beauty, his vanity fostered and stimulated by the flattery she so cunningly administered. Like Paris, he felt himself beloved by goddesses. June’s image faded. Two years had passed since his confession in the wood. He had seen her only at intervals and then under a perpetual ban of restraint. He was not the man to remain constant to a memory. June hovered on the edges of his consciousness like a sad-eyed shadow, looking at him with a pleading protest that made him feel angry with her. She was a dim, unappealing figure beside the radiant youthfulness, the sophisticated coquetries of Black Dan’s daughter.