“June, listen. We were going out driving at five. Mary Moore may be down at any moment. Come quick; she mustn’t see you. She’s the worst gossip in San Francisco. Come, I’ll help you.” She dragged the girl up with an arm around her, hurried her to the top of the stairs, along the hall, and into her room. There she let her fall into an arm-chair, and, stepping back, locked the door. In the sweet-scented, airy room, with its thin muslin curtains softening the hot brilliancy of the landscape, June sat in the arm-chair, silent and motionless, her face pinched. Rosamund, who had never seen her sister like this, did not know what to do, and in despair, resorted to the remedies she had been accustomed to using when her mother had been ill. She softly rubbed June’s temples with cologne and fanned her. Finally she knelt down by her side and said tenderly, “What is it, Junie, dear? Tell it to me.” “I have told it to you,” said June. “He’s not free; that’s all. You all said it, but I wouldn’t believe it. Now he’s said it and I’ve got to believe it.” She spoke in a high, hard voice, and Rosamund, kneeling on the floor, put her arms round her, and said with ingenuous consolation, “But now you know it, the worst’s over.” “Everything’s over,” said June dully. Her eyes fell to her lap, and there, in one hand, she saw the wilted remains of the little bunch of wild flowers. A sudden realization of what her feelings had been when she picked them, how joyous, how shyly happy, how full of an elated pleasure of life, and what they were now, fell upon her with desolating force. She gave a cry, and, turning from her sister, pressed her face against the back of the chair and burst into a storm of tears. CHAPTER VI READJUSTMENT June and July passed, and the life in the De Soto house was very uneventful. As soon as the group of guests left June requested her sister to ask no more visitors for a time, and the mid-summer days filed by, unoccupied in their opulent, sun-bathed splendor. The blow at first crushed her. Despite the warnings she had received, it had come upon her with the stunning force of the entirely unexpected. The very fact that Jerry had been attacked by scandal had lent an exalted fervor to her belief in him. Even now, had there been a possibility of her continuing in this belief, she would have persisted. Weak, loving women have an extraordinary talent for self-deception, and June combined with weakness and love an irrepressible optimism. She tried to plead for him with herself, argued his case as before a stern judge, attempted in her ignorance to find extenuating circumstances for him, and then came face to face with the damning, incontrovertible fact that he himself had admitted.