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 encroaching 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.

CHAPTER 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, and abandoned conf