, tenebrious.

The mountain is visible but a moment. An immense white fog-bank which
has been crouching on the horizon rears suddenly and rushes across the
ocean, whose low mutter rises to a roar. It sweeps like a tidal wave
across cliffs and Fort. It halts abruptly against the face of the
mountain. In the same moment the ocean stills. It would almost seem that
Nature held her breath, awaiting some awful event.

Suddenly, in the very middle of the fog-bank, appears the shadowy figure
of a woman. She is gliding--to the right--rapidly and stealthily. Youth
is in her slender grace, her delicate profile, dimly outlined. Her long
silver-blond hair is unbound and luminously distinct from the white
fog. She walks swiftly across the lower table of the mountain, then
disappears. One sees, vaguely, a dark figure crouching along the lower
fringe of the fog. That, too, disappears.

For a moment the silence seems intensified. Then, suddenly, it is
crossed by a low whir--a strange sound in the midnight. Then a shriek
whose like is never heard save when a soul is wrenched without warning
in frightfullest torture from its body. Then another and another
and another in rapid succession, each fainter and more horrible in
suggestion than the last. With them has mingled the single frenzied cry
of a man. A moment later a confused hubbub arises from the Fort and
town, followed by the flashes of many lights and the report of musketry.
Then the fog presses downward on the scene. All sound but that of the
ocean, which seems to have drawn into its loud dull voice all the angers
of all the dead, ceases as though muffled. The fog lingers a moment,
then drifts back as it came, and Fort Ross is the Fort Ross of to-day.

And this is the story:--

When the Princess Helene de Gagarin married Alexander Rotscheff, she
little anticipated that she would spend her honeymoon in the northern
wilds of the Californias. Nevertheless, when her husband was appointed
Governor of the Fort Ross and Bodega branch of the great Alaskan Fur
Company, she volunteered at once to go with him--being in that stage of
devotion which may be termed the emotionally heroic as distinguished
from the later of non-resistance. As the exile would last but a few
years, and as she was a lady of a somewhat adventurous spirit, to say
nothing of the fact that she was deeply in love, her interpretation of
wifely duty hardly wore the hue of martyrdom even to herself.

Notwithstanding, a