“That’s what I’ve come to talk about,” she said. “I don’t feel sometimes as if I could live here any longer, as if I could breathe here. I hate to go out. I hate to meet people. Every corner I turn I’m afraid that I may meet _them_--and--and--then--” her voice suddenly became hoarse and she sat up and cleared her throat. For a moment a heavy silence held the room. The Colonel broke it. “How would you like to go up to Foleys for a while?” he suggested. “Your father was telling me the other day that the superintendent of the Barranca had a nice little house and a very decent sort of wife. You could stay there. It would be a change.” “Foleys!” she echoed. “Oh, not Foleys! It’s too full of the past before anything had happened. No, I want to go away, far away, away from everything. That’s what I came to talk about. I want to go to Europe.” “Europe!” he exclaimed blankly. “But--but--you’d be gone for months.” “Yes, that’s just it. That’s what I want--to be gone for months, for years even. I want to get away from San Francisco and California and everything I know here.” The Colonel was silent. He felt suddenly depressed and chilled. San Francisco without June! His life without June! The mean little room with its hideous wall paper and cheap furniture came upon him with its true dreary strangeness. The city outside grew suddenly a hollow place of wind and fog. Life, that was always so full for him, grew blank with a sense of cold, nostalgic emptiness. He had never realized before how she illumined every corner of it. “Well, dearie,” he said, trying to speak cheerfully--“that sounds a big undertaking; sort of thing you don’t settle up all in a minute. You couldn’t go alone and Rosamund couldn’t go with you.” “I know all that. I’ve thought it all out. I haven’t slept well lately and I arranged it when I was awake at night. I could take some one with me, a sort of companion person. And then when Rosamund got married and came over there with Lionel, why, then I could stay with them. Perhaps I could live with them for a while. He has such a big house.” She paused, evidently waiting to see how the Colonel would take her suggestions. “That’s all possible enough,” he said,--“but--well, there’s your father. How about him?” “Oh, my father!” the note of scorn in her voice was supplemented by a side look at him which showed she had no further illusions as to her father. “My father can get on very well without me.” Even if she had come to know Allen at his just worth, the hardness of her tone hurt the Colonel. It showed him how deep had been the change in her in the last three years. “It’s hard on him just the same,” he said, “to lose his two daughters at once.” “Parents have to lose their children,” she answered in the same tone. “Suppose I’d married a foreigner like Rosamund?” The Colonel did not answer. Suddenly she laid the hand near him on his. “There’s only you and Rosamund,” she said. “And now Rosamund’s going too.”