Viola had spent the morning in the garden, sitting under the great fig-tree, sewing. The house was unbearable to her, and she wondered why her father had chosen to remain there, working methodically over an old solitaire he was trying to recall. Late in the afternoon, her work done, she resolved to go out for a walk. Entering the sitting-room with her hat and gloves in her hand, she found the colonel still sitting at the table, upon which the cards were arranged in twelve neat piles. He had mastered the solitaire, and now refused to accompany her on the ground that he had an engagement to teach it to Corinne, who had that day gone to school for the first time. He seemed to be looking forward to the few hours of the child's society that the afternoon would give him, and had set forth on a corner of the table a little feast of cookies and fruit with which to regale her when the solitaire became irksome. Viola was not sorry that he would not come. She liked being alone, with nothing to interrupt the aimless flow of her thoughts. The air was clear, fresh, and fine. The languor of the warm weather was gone, and the girl, as she fared toward one of the little plazas which at intervals interrupt the passage of the long streets, felt the promise of autumn. Sitting on a bench in the plaza, she looked out over the city, and caught a glimpse of the sparkle of the river at the end of an open vista, and, cutting into the thin pink of the sunset sky, roof beyond roof and chimney over chimney. The golden dreaminess of summer was over, with its brooding, purposeless inaction. The haze of churned-up yellow dust, was dispersed by a breath that held a prophecy of coming cold, sharp and imperious. There was a stir in the air, a promise in the flaring sky. Its light fell on Viola's face, and seemed to suddenly send a shaft into her deadened heart. She moved and looked up, almost as if some one had spoken to her. On the pallor of her lifted face the reflected glow shone like gilding. The dead lethargy that had held her all summer seemed to be breaking. As she sat staring at the illuminated sky, her mind sprang back like a mended spring, past all the despair and struggle of the past three months to the life behind it, and then forward to the future. A rousing of energy, a sense of work to do, a return of force and will, ran through her in a brisk, revivifying current. The checked stream of her life seemed to burst the barrier that had held it and to move onward again.