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.

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, death!  Nevertheless, an hour later, when the jingle of spurs and bridle were again heard in the road, she started to her feet with bent brows and a kindling eye, and confronted Captain Poindexter in the corridor.