During the early part of the summer June was in ignorance of the momentous shuffling of the cards of her destiny. She lived quietly, rarely going to the city, and spending most of her time in the gardens or on the balcony. Rosamund, who went about more, marketed in the village and shopped in town, began to hear rumors of Jerry’s interest in Miss Gracey. She met them riding together in the hot solitude of the country roads, saw them meet on the trains to the city. Finally the rumors passed to San Francisco and the Colonel heard them. He came down to San Mateo that Saturday to talk things over with Rosamund. They were worried and uneasy, a sense of calamity weighing on them both. Though June was one of those women who obstinately adhere to the bright side, who cling to hope till it crumbles in their hands, she felt, during the summer, premonitions of ill fortune. Those inexplicable shadows of approaching evil that Nature throws forward over the path of sensitive temperaments had darkened her outlook. She questioned herself as to her heaviness of heart, assuring herself that there was no new cloud on her horizon. In the constancy of her own nature she did not realize, as a more experienced woman would, that her hold on Jerry was a silken thread which would wear very thin in the passage of years, and be ready to snap at the first strain. But the moods of apprehension and gloom began to be augmented by ripples from the pool of gossip without. She heard that Jerry was oftener in San Mateo than ever before, and she saw him less frequently. One afternoon she met him driving with Mercedes, and the girl’s radiant smile of recognition had something of malicious triumph under its beaming sweetness. June drove home silent and pale. In her room she tried to argue herself out of her depression. But it stayed with her, made her preoccupied and quiet all the evening, lay down with her at night, and was heavy and cold at her heart in the morning. At the end of September they returned to town. They had been back a few weeks when one afternoon she met Jerry on the street and they stopped for a few moments’ conversation. It was nothing more than the ordinary interchange of commonplaces between old friends, but when he had passed on, the girl walked forward looking wan and feeling a deadly sense of blankness. He was the same man, gay, handsome, suave, and yet he seemed suddenly far removed from her, to be smiling with the perfunctory politeness of a stranger. The chill exhaled by a dying love penetrated her, pierced her to the core. She did not understand it, him, or herself. All that she knew was that the sense of despondency became suddenly overpowering, and closed like an iron clutch on her heart.