She arose, tiptoed softly over to the table, and examined the other books thereon.  There were volumes of the early English poets, an album, and A Souvenir of Friendship, in red and gold, like the Hemans.  She opened the souvenir, and looked idly at the small, exquisitely fine steel engravings, the alliterative verses, the tales of sentiment beginning with long preambles couched in choicest English.  She shut the book with a little weary sigh, and looked irresolutely at her sleeping aunt, then at the chair by the north window.

Lucina felt none of the languor which is sometimes caused by extreme heat.  Instead, there was a fierce electric tension through all her nerves.  She was weary almost to death, the cool of this dark room was unutterably grateful to her, yet she could not remain quiet.  She had left her parasol and hat on the hall-table.  She stole out softly, with scarcely the faintest rustle of skirts, tied on her hat, took her parasol, and went through the house to the back-garden door.

Looking back, she saw the old servant-woman’s broadly interrogatory face in a vine-wreathed kitchen-window.  “I am going out in the garden a little while, ’Liza,” said Lucina.

The garden was down-crushed, its extreme of sweetness pressed out beneath the torrid sunbeams as under flaming hoofs.  Lucina passed between the wilting ranks and flattened beds of flowers, and the breath of them in her face was like the rankest sweetness of love, when its delicacy, even for itself, is all gone.  The pungent odor of box was like a shameless call from the street.  Lucina went into the summer-house and sat down.  It was stifling, and the desperate sweetnesses of the garden seemed to have collected there, as in a nest.

Lucina, after a minute, sprang up, her face was a deep pink, she had a gentle distracted frown on her sweet forehead, her lips were pouting; she did not look in the least like the Lucina of the early spring.

She went out of the summer-house, and down the garden paths, and then over a stone wall, into the rear field, which bounded it.  This field had been mowed not long before, and the stubble was pink and gold in the afternoon light.

The field was broad, and skirted on the west by a thick wood.  Lucina, holding her green parasol, crossed the field to the wood.  The stubble was hot to her feet, white butterflies flew in her face, rusty-winged things hurled themselves in her path, like shrill completions from some mill of insect life.

All along the wood there was a border of shadow.  Lucina kept close to the trees, and so down the field.  A faint, cool dampness stole out from the depths of the wood and tempered the heat for the width of its shade.  Lucina put down her parasol; she was walking quite steadily, as if with a purpose.

The wood extended the length of many fields, running parallel with the main village street, behind the houses.  Lucina, passing the Prescott house from the rear, instead of the front, seeing the unpainted walls and roof-slopes of barn and wood-sheds, and the garden, had a curious sense of retroversion in material things which suited well her mind.  She felt that day as if she were turned backward to her own self.