Corinne seemed to think this remark worthy of attention. Her search for the pin was arrested and she pondered for a moment. Then she looked at the colonel and said tentatively, not quite sure of the reasonableness of her reply: "I suppose so that people can have mothers, colonel." "So that people can have love, Corinne," he answered sadly. Corinne, feeling that her solution of the problem had not been the right one, returned to the pin. She found it, and bending over the patient kitten, inserted it carefully into the band. But her calculations were not true, the pin pricked, and the cat, with an angry mew, broke away and went scuttling across the room inclosed in the skirt. Her appearance was so funny that Corinne sat back on her heels and, punching the colonel's knee, cried in a burst of laughter: "Oh, look, colonel, look! Ain't she cunning?" The colonel looked. The cat turned, still in the skirt, and eyed them both with a look of hurt protest. It appealed to the colonel's humor as it had to Corinne's. Their combined laughter filled the room and greeted Viola as she came up the passage from one of her long walks. "What are you laughing at?" she asked, as she opened the door and entered like a pale vision wilted with the heat and light outside. The colonel's laughter died away immediately. Her listless air of delicacy struck him anew with the silent reproach which her mere presence now seemed to suggest. All amusement faded from his face, and he looked guiltily conscious, like a child found in mischief. A short time after this a hot spell struck the city. Though it was September, the heat was stifling. For three days the mercury stood so high that even Corinne's engrossingly arduous play with the doll and the kitten was listlessly performed, and she spent most of her time in the sitting-room with Viola and the colonel, where, behind closed shutters, they gasped away the hours. The old man seemed to feel the heat less than before; at least, he said little about it, and occupied himself in teaching Corinne to play solitaire, a game for which she evinced a precocious aptitude. Viola, sitting by the window, where now and then a fine edge of warm air sifted in between the slats in the shutters, watched them. Her father seemed as much interested as the child, and the girl wondered how in this oppressive exile he could have spirit for so trivial an amusement. After three days the heat broke, and was succeeded by a soothing, balmy coolness, under the influence of which the city seemed to relax and rest inert in the torpor of recuperation. The freshened airs that flowed through the overheated old house extracted every odor left from years of bad cooking and insufficient ventilation. The musty hangings of the rooms closed in and held the oven-like atmosphere. Dusty curtains and grease-stained carpets added their contributions to the closeness left by years of untidy occupancy.