June walked home with her eyes down-drooped, her head hanging. She took no heed of the brilliant colors that were lending beauty to the crumpled skyline of the mountains. She did not see the people who passed her, some of whom knew her and wondered at her absorption. Her thoughts went back to the days at Foleys when she and Rosamund had made money with the garden and had been so full of work and healthy, innocent happiness. Then she thought of the life in San Francisco, with its growth of lower ambitions, its passion and its suffering. And now this--so dark, so menacing, so full of sudden, unfamiliar dread! A phrase she had heard in church the Sunday before rose to her recollection: “Her feet go down to death.” As her thoughts roamed somberly back over the three epochs of her life the phrase kept recurring to her, welling continually to the surface of her mind, with sinister persistence-- “Her feet go down to death.” CHAPTER VI THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE Since his connection with the Graceys Jerry had been buying stock in the numerous undeveloped and unpaying mines which had cropped up like mushrooms round the edges of the town. In the end of July a new strike in the two-thousand-foot level of the Cresta Plata sent the stock of the mines in the vicinity suddenly up. As the vein was opened it developed into a discovery of great importance. The shares Jerry held doubled in value and continued to advance. August was not half over when he realized that, on paper at least, he was again a rich man. The realization brought with it a pulsing sense of exhilaration. It meant not only the joys of independent wealth, which were to him among the dearest on earth, but the liberty to do with his life what he pleased. It was not only freedom from the Graceys, with whom his work had become a detested servitude, but an escape from the bonds his marriage had cast round him. Escape from it all--the scorn of his employers, the drudgery of his position, the meaningless tie that held him to an unloved wife and denied him the woman he craved. The fever of the time and his own mounting fortunes was in his blood. Actions that under normal conditions would have seemed to him base he now contemplated with a sense of headstrong defiance. He was on fire with the lust of money and the desire of woman. The two passions carried him off his feet, swept away his judgment and reason. But the instinctive deceptiveness of the lover of intrigue did not desert him. While he was inwardly contemplating desperate steps, on the surface he appeared to be merely full of boyish animation and high spirits. To June alone he was different, a man of almost terrifying moods, before whom at one moment she shrank and the next melted. He had brushed aside her request not to see her, as he would later on brush aside all her requests, her reticences and modesties, and be the master of a broken and abject slave.