“It’s quite easy for you to give it to me, isn’t it?” she asked without turning. “You’re not like father, always talking about your wonderful, priceless stocks, and with not a cent to give a person who’s just about got to the end of everything.” “Don’t talk about that,” he answered quickly. “There can’t be a better use for my money than to help you when you’re in trouble. I’ll see you in a few days and arrange then to give it to you.” She turned from the window. “Well, good-by, then,” she said. “I must go. Good-by, Uncle Jim, my own dear, dear Uncle Jim.” She extended her hand to him, and as he took it, looked with wistful eyes into his. “I feel as if you were really my father,” she said. “It’s only to a father or mother that a person feels they can come and ask things from as I have from you to-day.” The Colonel kissed her without speaking. At the doorway she turned and he waved his hand in farewell, but again said nothing. June walked home through the soft gray damp of the late afternoon. As she looked up the lines of the long streets that climbed the hills, then sloped down toward the water front, she saw the fog blotting them out, erasing outlines, stealthily creeping downward till the distance looked like a slate blurred by a wet sponge. She remembered evenings like this in the first year of her San Francisco life, when she walked home briskly with the chill air moist on her face and her imagination stirred by the mystery and strangeness of the dim, many-hilled city, veiled in whorls and eddies of vaporous white. There was no beauty in it to-night, only a sense of desolation, cold and creepingly pervasive as the fog. CHAPTER XIV BED-ROCK It took the Colonel a week to raise the money. He did it by selling the second of his South Park houses. The sale being a hurried one of property already well on the decline, the house realized less than, even in the present state of eclipse, it was worth. Five years before it had been appraised at fifteen thousand dollars. To-day the best offer he could get was nine. He placed the money in the bank, the five thousand to stay there till June had decided more definitely on her movements. The remainder he would leave on deposit to his own account. June, in Europe, with five thousand dollars to her fortune, was not beyond the circle of his sense of responsibility. Some one must have money to give her when she needed it, as she certainly would. Her habits of economy had long ago been sloughed off with her faded cotton dresses and her country-made boots. Rosamund would be able to give her a home, but there must be some one somewhere upon whom she could make a demand for funds.