aching of the tide in the meadow. With his eyes on the light, he
again urged his horse forward. The rain lulled, the clouds began to
break, the landscape alternately lightened and grew dark; the outlines
of the crumbling _hacienda_ walls that enshrined the light grew more
visible. A strange and dreamy resemblance to the long blue-grass plain
before his wife's paternal house, as seen by him during his evening
rides to courtship, pressed itself upon him. He remembered, too, that
she used to put a light in the window to indicate her presence.
Following this retrospect, the moon came boldly out, sparkled upon the
overflow of silver at his feet, seemed to show the dark, opaque meadow
beyond for a moment, and then disappeared. It was dark now, but the
lesser earthly star still shone before him as a guide, and pushing
towards it, he passed in the all-embracing shadow.

IV.

As Mrs. Tucker, erect, white, and rigid, drove away from the _tienda_,
it seemed to her to sink again into the monotonous plain, with all its
horrible realities. Except that there was now a new and heart-breaking
significance to the solitude and loneliness of the landscape, all that
had passed might have been a dream. But as the blood came back to her
cheek, and little by little her tingling consciousness returned, it
seemed as if her life had been the dream, and this last scene the
awakening reality. With eyes smarting with the moisture of shame, the
scarlet blood at times dyeing her very neck and temples, she muffled
her lowered crest in her shawl and bent over the reins. Bit by bit she
recalled, in Poindexter's mysterious caution and strange allusions, the
corroboration of her husband's shame and her own disgrace. This was why
she was brought hither--the deserted wife, the abandoned confederate!
The mocking glitter of the concave vault above her, scoured by the
incessant wind, the cold stare of the shining pools beyond, the hard
outlines of the Coast Range, and the jarring accompaniment of her
horse's hoofs and rattling buggy-wheels, alternately goaded and
distracted her. She found herself repeating "No! no! no!" with the
dogged reiteration of fever. She scarcely knew when or how she reached
the _hacienda_. She was only conscious that as she entered the _patio_
the dusky solitude that had before filled her with unrest now came to
her like balm. A benumbing peace seemed to fall from the crumbling
walls; the peace of utter seclusion, isolation, oblivion