It was an overcast autumn that year, with much gray weather and early fogs. The city had never looked to June so cheerless. She was a great deal alone, Rosamund’s time being more and more claimed by Lionel Harrower. He was her first lover, and it was a part of Rosamund’s fate that he should have come to her unexpected and unasked for. She was of the order of women who stand where they are placed, doing what comes under their hand, demanding little of life, and to whom life’s gifts come as a surprise. That such a man as the young Briton should prefer her to her sister, whose superior charm she had always acknowledged and been proud of, was to her astonishing. She was sobered and softened in these days of awakening love. One could see the woman, the mother, ripe, soft, full of a quiet devotion, slowly dawning. Sometimes she was irritable, a thing previously unknown. She could not believe that Harrower loved her, and yet as the days passed, and she found the hours spent with him growing ever more disturbingly sweet, she wondered how she could ever support a life in which he did not figure, and the thought filled her with torturing fears. One gray afternoon, Rosamund having left for a walk in the park with Harrower, June, after wandering about the empty house for a dreary hour, resolved that she too would go out for a stroll. She had felt more cheerful lately. Jerry had come to call two days before, when she was out, and this fact had seemed to her a proof of his unwaned interest. She had written him a brief note, stating her regrets at missing him and her hopes that he would repeat the visit soon. This was only polite and proper, she assured herself. Her walk took her to Van Ness Avenue and then up the side street toward the little Turk Street plaza. For the past two years it had been a favorite promenade of hers. The present was not sufficiently fraught with pain to render memories of a happier past unbearable. She strolled through the small park and then returned and walked back toward the avenue. As she turned the corner into the great thoroughfare, she stopped, the color dying from her face, the softness of its outlines stiffening. Walking slowly toward her were Jerry and Mercedes Gracey. They were close together, Mercedes lightly touching with the tips of her fingers the top of the ornamental fence beside her. Her eyes were down-drooped, her whole air one of maidenly modesty, which yet had in it something coyly encouraging. Jerry, close at her shoulder, was looking down at her, with the eyes of a lover.