June turned to the window. She could see the face of a clock down in the street. It was nearly four. At any moment he might come! She looked back across her shoulder, and her face was distorted with anger.
But Irene had not moved; in her gloved hands she ceaselessly turned and twisted the little bunch of violets.
The tears of rage and disappointment rolled down June's cheeks.
"How could you come?" she said. "You have been a false friend to me!"
Again Irene laughed. June saw that she had played a wrong card, and broke down.
"Why have you come?" she sobbed. "You've ruined my life, and now you want to ruin his!"
Irene's mouth quivered; her eyes met June's with a look so mournful that the girl cried out in the midst of her sobbing, "No, no!"
But Irene's head bent till it touched her breast. She turned, and went quickly out, hiding her lips with the little bunch of violets.
June ran to the door. She heard the footsteps going down and down. She called out: "Come back, Irene! Come back!"
The footsteps died away....
Bewildered and torn, the girl stood at the top of the stairs.
Why had Irene gone, leaving her mistress of the field? What did it mean? Had she really given him up to her? Or had she...?
And she was the prey of a gnawing uncertainty.... Bosinney did not come....
About six o'clock that afternoon old Jolyon returned from Wistaria Avenue, where now almost every day he spent some hours, and asked if his grand-daughter were upstairs. On being told that she had just come in, he sent up to her room to request her to come down and speak to him.
He had made up his mind to tell her that he was reconciled with her father. In future bygones must be bygones. He would no longer live alone, or practically alone, in this great house; he was going to give it up, and take one in the country for his son, where they could all go and live together. If June did not like this, she could have an allowance and live by herself. It wouldn't make much difference to her, for it was a long time since she had shown him any affection.
But when June came down, her face was pinched and piteous; there was a strained, pathetic look in her eyes. She snuggled up in her old attitude on the arm of his chair, and what he said compared but poorly with the clear, authoritative, injured statement he had thought out with much care. His heart felt sore, as the great heart of a mother-bird feels sore when its youngling flies and bruises its wing. His words halted, as though he were apologizing for having at last deviated from the path of virtue, and succumbed, in defiance of sounder principles, to his more natural instincts.
He seemed nervous lest, in thus announcing his intentions, he should be setting his granddaughter a bad example; and now that he came to the point, his way of putting the suggestion that, if she didn't like it, she could live by herself and lump it, was delicate in the extreme.'
"And if, by any chance, my darling," he said, "you found you didn't get on--with them, why, I could make that all right. You could have what you liked. We could find a little flat in London where you could set up, and I could be running to continually.
But the children," he added, "are dear little things!"
Then, in the midst of this grave, rather transparent, explanation of changed policy, his eyes twinkled. "This'll astonish Timothy's weak nerves. That precious young thing will have something to say about this, or I'm a Dutchman!"
June had not yet spoken. Perched thus on the arm of his chair, with her head above him, her face was invisible. But presently he felt her warm cheek against his own, and knew that, at all events, there was nothing very alarming in her attitude towards his news. He began to take courage.
"You'll like your father," he said--"an amiable chap. Never was much push about him, but easy to get on with. You'll find him artistic and all that."
And old Jolyon bethought him of the dozen or so water-colour drawings all carefully locked up in his bedroom; for now that his son was going to become a man of property he did not think them quite such poor things as heretofore.
"As to your--your stepmother," he said, using the word with some little difficulty, "I call her a refined woman--a bit of a Mrs.
Gummidge, I shouldn't wonder--but very fond of Jo. And the children," he repeated--indeed, this sentence ran like music through all his solemn self-justification--"are sweet little things!"
If June had known, those words but reincarnated that tender love for little children, for the young and weak, which in the past had made him desert his son for her tiny self, and now, as the cycle rolled, was taking him from her.
But he began to get alarmed at her silence, and asked impatiently: "Well, what do you say?"
June slid down to his knee, and she in her turn began her tale.
