The love of flowers was strong in Viola, and pressing her breast against the top of the fence, she stood peering in at the garden with its roughly bordered terraces and pebbled paths. The mignonette was growing in a border that skirted the side of the house. In the parterres below it were many varieties of blossoming annuals and rose-bushes still densely in flower. The cypress-trees from the yard below showed their dark, funereal tops over the outer fence, and a gaunt eucalyptus made a pattern on the pale noonday sky with its drooping foliage. From the garden Viola's gaze turned to the house. It presented its side to the view, its narrow front to the street. Its seaward face was flanked by a balcony, and windows, commanding the enormous sweep of water and distant hills, were set closely along the wall. In one of these windows Viola saw the sign her eyes had grown so accustomed to that morning--"Furnished Rooms." Half an hour later she made her exit from the house, having completed her arrangement to become a tenant that same day. Its sole occupant at the time was the landlady, Miss Defoe, a spinster of advanced years, who dwelt there with her brother. She was glad of the chance of a lodger, especially one who seemed so gently tractable. The almost inaccessible position of the house made it difficult to rent the rooms, even at the lowest prices. Viola found that the terms offered her were more desirable than those made by Mrs. Cassidy. In the afternoon, having made her escape from the widow's with guilty stealth, she took up her residence on the high hilltop, in a room from one window of which she could look out through the Golden Gate on the broad bosom of the Pacific, while from the other she could see the dappled sweep of the Alameda hills, with Berkeley and Oakland clustering about their bases. A life uneventful and monotonous now began for the solitary girl. The days in the house on the hill passed with the even, colorless rapidity of days full of uninteresting duties and bereft of the stimulus of hope. Viola plodded on doggedly, with her head down and her eyes on the furrow before her. Work had cropped up quickly, and she turned to it with dull resolution. In the back of the house some former tenant had built a small greenhouse, which, during the Defoes' occupancy, had been left in dusty desuetude. Being granted the use of it, she cleaned and repaired it, and here once more plied her old graceful trade of raising plants.