long
nights when she could hear the rain fall monotonously on the shingles,
or startle her with a short, sharp reveille en the windows; there were
brief days of flying clouds and drifting sunshine, and intervals of
dull gray shadow, when the heaving white breakers beyond the Gate slowly
lifted themselves and sank before her like wraiths of warning. At such
times, in her accepted solitude, Mrs. Bunker gave herself up to strange
moods and singular visions; the more audacious and more striking it
seemed to her from their very remoteness, and the difficulty she was
beginning to have in materializing them. The actual personality of
Wynyard Marion, as she knew it in her one interview, had become very
shadowy and faint in the months that passed, yet when the days were
heavy she sometimes saw herself standing by his side in some vague
tropical surroundings, and hailed by the multitude as the faithful wife
and consort of the great Leader, President, Emperor--she knew not what!
Exactly how this was to be managed, and the manner of Zephas' effacement
from the scene, never troubled her childish fancy, and, it is but fair
to say, her woman's conscience. In the logic before alluded to, it
seemed to her that all ethical responsibility for her actions rested
with the husband who had unduly married her. Nor were those visions
always roseate. In the wild declamation of that exciting epoch which
filled the newspapers there was talk of short shrift with traitors. So
there were days when the sudden onset of a squall of hail against her
window caused her to start as if she had heard the sharp fusillade of
that file of muskets of which she had sometimes read in history.

One day she had a singular fright. She had heard the sound of oars
falling with a precision and regularity unknown to her. She was startled
to see the approach of a large eight-oared barge rowed by men in
uniform, with two officers wrapped in cloaks in the stern sheets, and
before them the glitter of musket barrels. The two officers appeared to
be conversing earnestly, and occasionally pointing to the shore and the
bluff above. For an instant she trembled, and then an instinct of revolt
and resistance followed. She hurriedly removed the ring, which she
usually wore when alone, from her finger, slipped it with the packet
under the mattress of her bed, and prepared with blazing eyes to face
the intruders. But when the boat was beached, the two officers, with
scarcely a glance t