1 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. stillness       B. refuge   C. thundering   D. withered   E. oppressive F. unattended G. gripped       H. creaked   I. approaching J. somewhere   K. hastily

On the morning of the first of September, Scarlett awoke with suffocating sense of dread upon her, a dread she had taken to her pillow the night before. She thought, dulled with sleep: ‘What was it that I was worrying about when I went to bed last night? Oh, yes the fighting. There was a battle,     1    ,yesterday! Oh, who won?’ She sat up    2    , rubbing her eyes, and her worried heart took up yesterday’s load again.

The air was    3     even in the early morning hour, hot with the scorching promise of a noon of glaring blue sky and pitiless bronze sun. The road outside lay silent. No wagons    4     by. No troops raised the red dust with their tramping feet, no pleasant sounds of breakfasts being prepared, for all the near neighbors except Mrs. Meade and Mrs. Merriwether had sought    5    in Macon. And she could hear nothing from their houses either. Farther down the street the business section was quiet and many of the stores and offices were locked and boarded up, while their occupants were somewhere about the countryside with rifles in their hands.

The     6    that greeted her seemed even more sinister this morning than on any of the mornings of the queer quiet week preceding it. She rose quickly, without her usual preliminary burrows and stretches, and went to the window, hoping to see some neighbor’s face, some heartening sight. But the road was empty. She noted how the leaves on the trees were still dark green but dry and heavily coated with red dust, and how     7    and sad the untended flowers in the front yard looked.

As she stood, looking out of the window, there came to her ears a far-off sound, faint and sullen as the first distant thunder of a(n)    8    storm.

‘Rain,’ she thought in the first moment, and her country-bred mind added, ‘We certainly need it.’ But, in a split instant: ‘Rain? No! Not rain! Cannon!’

Her heart racing she leaned from the window, her ear cocked to the far-off roaring, trying to discover from which direction it came. But the dim     9    was so distant that, for a moment, she could not tell. ‘Make it from Marietta,’ she prayed. ‘Or Decatur. But not from the south! Not from the south!’ She    10    the windowstill tighter and strained her ears and the far-away booming seemed louder. And it was coming from the south.