The selling of the house and the subsequent flight of the Reeds had been, as Gault had guessed, Viola's idea. When, the morning after those two soul-destroying interviews, she had come down, white and apathetic, and had told her father that she wanted to leave the city, the old man, in a desperate desire to reinstate himself in her regard, had been willing to accede to anything. Pressed by Viola, he had hurried through the sale, had taken the small sum Robson had offered without demur, and, driven by her feverish anxiety, had paid off all their household debts and handed to her the remaining money. This, with himself, he had placed entirely in her hands. As the girl locked it into the small tin box in which she kept such valuables as they possessed, she had suddenly looked at it, and then at him, and finally said: "But the mortgage? Wasn't there interest or something to pay on that?" "Mortgage!" said the colonel, in innocent surprise. "What mortgage?" Viola looked away from him and murmured something about being mixed up. She saw that he had forgotten the story by which, three years ago, he had accounted to her for the first sudden era of prosperity. She felt, with a dreary indifference, that she did not care where that money had come from. She, at least, had not been put forward as a means of procuring it. The breathless hurry of their departure, and the quantity of work that accumulates about the breaking up of even so small a household, gave her no time for the indulgence of her own bitter thoughts. The days passed in a turmoil of noise and movement. In a nightmare atmosphere of dust and strange faces she haggled with the Jews from the second-hand stores on Mission Street, listened to their sarcastic comments on the old pieces of furniture she had passed her life among, watched them with dull eyes as they tested the springs of the colonel's chair and rubbed between appraising fingers the curtains his young bride had bought twenty-four years before. At night she crept into her bed, too exhausted for thought, to lose herself in blessed gulfs of sleep.