ain road he was obliged to traverse part of the
highway his wife had walked that afternoon, and to pass within a mile
of the _casa_ where she was. Long before he reached that point his eyes
were straining the darkness in that direction for some indication of
the house which was to him familiar. Becoming now accustomed to the
even obscurity, less trying to the vision than the alternate light and
shadow of cloud or the full glare of the moonlight, he fancied he could
distinguish its low walls over the monotonous level. One of those
impulses which had so often taken the place of resolution in his
character suddenly possessed him to diverge from his course and
approach the house. Why, he could not have explained. It was not from
any feeling of jealous suspicion or contemplated revenge--that had
passed with the presence of Patterson; it was not from any vague
lingering sentiment for the woman he had wronged--he would have shrunk
from meeting her at that moment. But it was full of these and more
possibilities by which he might or might not be guided, and was at
least a movement towards some vague end, and a distraction from certain
thoughts he dared not entertain and could not entirely dismiss.
Inconceivable and inexplicable to human reason, it might have been
acceptable to the Divine omniscience for its predestined result.

He left the road at a point where the marsh encroached upon the meadow,
familiar to him already as near the spot where he had debarked from the
Chinaman's boat the day before. He remembered that the walls of the
_hacienda_ were distinctly visible from the _tules_ where he had hidden
all day, and he now knew that the figures he had observed near the
building, which had deterred his first attempts at landing, must have
been his wife and his friend. He knew that a long tongue of the slough
filled by the rising tide followed the marsh, and lay between him and
the _hacienda_. The sinking of his horse's hoofs in the spongy soil
determined its proximity, and he made a detour to the right to avoid
it. In doing so, a light suddenly rose above the distant horizon ahead
of him, trembled faintly, and then burned with a steady lustre. It was
a light at the _hacienda_. Guiding his horse half abstractedly in this
direction, his progress was presently checked by the splashing of the
animal's hoofs in the water. But the turf below was firm, and a salt
drop that had spattered to his lips told him that it was only the
encro