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Rh 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