There was no need now for the Colonel to study his accounts. He knew them through and through. There was so little to know. The shut-down mine in Shasta and his mortgage on the Folsom Street house were all that was left to him. On the day that the sale of the South Park house was decided upon he wrote to Rion Gracey, asking him for a position, any overground position that the owners of the Cresta Plata thought he would suit. It was a hard letter to write. He was nearly sixty, and he had never, since his youth, asked any one for anything for himself. But one must live, “G. T.’s widow” had to be considered, not to mention June, living in England and having to be dressed as June should always be dressed. Two days later the details of the sale were completed and the money deposited. Late that afternoon the Colonel, clad carefully in the shiny coat June had caught him brushing, went across town to Folsom Street. He had done what she had asked and all was ready. The servant told him she was confined to her room with a bad cold, and after a few minutes’ wait in the hall, he was conducted up stairs, and found her lying on a sofa in the great front room, with its lofty ceiling and tall, heavily draped windows. The sofa was drawn up before a small fire that sent a fluctuating glow over her face, flushed with a slight fever, and burnished the loose coil of brown hair that crowned her head. She had a heavy cold, her voice was hoarse, her words interrupted at intervals by a cough. She was delighted to see him, sitting up among the cushions on which she reclined to hold out her hand, and rallying him on the length of time since his last visit. “But I’ve been busy,” he said, drawing a chair up to the foot of the sofa, “busy over your affairs, young woman.” “My affairs,” she answered, looking puzzled; then with sudden comprehension, “Oh, the money!” “That’s it,” he nodded, “the money. Well, it’s all ready and waiting for you in the bank. When you want it we’ll open an account for you, or buy a letter of credit with it, or make whatever arrangement seems best. Anyway, there it is whenever you want to go.” “Oh, Uncle Jim!” she breathed. “And now what do you think’s happened?” “What?” he asked with suddenly arrested attention. It was on his mind that startling things might be expected to happen in the Allen household at any moment. “I’m not going!” “You’re not going? Junie, don’t tell me that!” The joy in his voice and eyes was transfiguring in its sudden radiance. He left his chair and sat down on the end of the sofa near her feet, leaning toward her, pathetically eager to hear. “I’ve changed my mind,”--a gleam of her old coquetry brightened her face. “Isn’t that one of the privileges of my sex?” “What made you change it? Good Lord, dearie, I’m so glad!”