By SOPHFRONIA SCOTT/Reported by Wendy Cole

We last saw her, weary and downtrodden, on page 1037, declaring "Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day." Now tomorrow has finally come for Scarlett O'Hara, the feisty heroine of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. And it couldn't be soon enough for the millions of fans who have been musing for 55 years on what she did after Rhett Butler told her he didn't "give a damn."

Four years in the making and published a year later than expected, Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley will finally be out in September. The novel picks up where GWTW left off, or so one can assume. Ripley isn't allowed to talk about it. "I'm terrible at keeping secrets," she says, "but I gave my word to the Mitchell estate lawyers, and they'd rip my tongue out with hot pincers if I talked." The secrecy also meant security precautions for Ripley, 57. She did all her writing in longhand ("I am not machine compatible," she says). But in order to prevent leaks, she couldn't use her usual typists for Scarlett. Instead her two daughters had to type and retype the entire work. "They will never let me forget it," quipped the author, who lives near Richmond.

Though thrilled at having been the one chosen to pen the sequel ("I was so terrified some Yankee was going to do it," she says), Ripley does feel the awesome burden of satisfying GWTW fans. The author of several best-selling historical novels says she reread Mitchell's work four times and copied out more than 300 pages of the original prose to get a feel for its style. "As a writer she broke every rule, using different tenses in the same paragraph and mixing points of view," Ripley points out. "I had to train myself to do the same." She brushes off published rumors that the book's delay was due to a poor manuscript. "For people who love Gone With the Wind, this will be more of the same thing. It really is a very good read." But it has to be. Practically the whole world awaits it.