There was work for every one, and work was the purpose of existence. She had claimed happiness as a right, demanded what is not to be; then, when the inexorable ruling will had interposed, had dropped from the ranks in the passion of a thwarted child. The glory and the dream--who realized them? Who of the millions about her had touched the happiness she had expected to seize and hold? Why should she be exempt from the grinding that forces the grain from the chaff? All yearned, aspired, dreamed, and yet, never achieving, lived on, learning their lesson of obedience. Only some bowed their necks to the yoke more quickly than others. There was a second plane of life--a plane to which some were rudely hurled and some crept by degrees. Here you went sternly on, and did the work before you for its own sake, not for yours. And thus, in time, self might be conquered and its insistent cry for recognition be stifled. There was a corner in the world for every one, where they took their broken idols and set them up, and some day would look at them and smile over the anguish there had been when they fell. The sunset deepened to a fine, transparent red, which looked as if it had been clarified of all denser matter. It gave a flush to Viola's upward-looking face. Her thoughts turned from the vague lines they had been following to closer personal ones. The love for her father, that had seemed frozen, gushed up in her heart. His face, with its wistful glance, came before her; a hundred instances of her past coldness rose in accusing memory. There was something better yet than work. Love--that was the axis of the world; that made life possible, and the sacrifice of self full of use and meaning; that was the key-note of the whole structure of existence. She rose to her feet, and rapidly, with her old firm alertness of step, moved out through the plaza. She wanted to run, to find the old man and, taking his head in her arms, whisper her contrition. Through street after street her swift footfall woke sharp, decisive echoes. Her face had lost its look of dejection and was set in lines of firmness and resolution. People, as she passed, turned to look at her--at the young face so full of a steady purpose, at the eyes deep with a woman's aspirations. Her thoughts flew forward, high-strung, exalted, beating against the confining limits of time and space. She would take him back to San Francisco. They would go together. How had she had the heart to hurt him so! Now, all blindness swept away by the breaking down of her egotism, she knew what he had suffered.