adfast resolution. She would tell him EVERYTHING, and know the worst.
Perhaps he would never come; perhaps she should not be alive to meet
him.

And so the days and nights slowly passed. The solitude which her
previous empty deceit had enabled her to fill with such charming visions
now in her awakened remorse seemed only to protract her misery. Had she
been a more experienced, though even a more guilty, woman she would have
suffered less. Without sympathy or counsel, without even the faintest
knowledge of the world or its standards of morality to guide her, she
accepted her isolation and friendlessness as a necessary part of her
wrongdoing. Her only criterion was her enemy--Mrs. Fairfax--and SHE
could seek her relief by joining her lover; but Mrs. Bunker knew now
that she herself had never had one--and was alone! Mrs. Fairfax had
broken openly with her husband; but SHE had DECEIVED hers, and the
experience and reckoning were still to come. In her miserable confession
it was not strange that this half child, half woman, sometimes looked
towards that gray sea, eternally waiting for her,--that sea which had
taken everything from her and given her nothing in return,--for an
obliterating and perhaps exonerating death!

The third day of her waiting isolation was broken upon by another
intrusion. The morning had been threatening, with an opaque, motionless,
livid arch above, which had taken the place of the usual flying scud and
shaded cloud masses of the rainy season. The whole outlying ocean, too,
beyond the bar, appeared nearer, and even seemed to be lifted higher
than the Bay itself, and was lit every now and then with wonderful
clearness by long flashes of breaking foam like summer lightning. She
knew that this meant a southwester, and began, with a certain mechanical
deliberation, to set her little domain in order against the coming gale.
She drove the cows to the rude shed among the scrub oaks, she collected
the goats and young kids in the corral, and replenished the stock of
fuel from the woodpile. She was quite hidden in the shrubbery when she
saw a boat making slow headway against the wind towards the little cove
where but a moment before she had drawn up the dingey beyond the reach
of breaking seas. It was a whaleboat from Saucelito containing a few
men. As they neared the landing she recognized in the man who seemed to
be directing the boat the second friend of Colonel Marion--the man who
had come with the Secreta