She went to the barn to feed Queenie for the last time.  That outraged old creature displayed her surprised countenance at the opening above her manger and blew sonorously through her nostrils.  Perhaps the gray mare remembered how she had been aroused at a similar hour once before, and by Cap’n Ira himself.  That experience must have been keen in the Queen of Sheba’s memory if she had any memory at all.

But the troubled girl gave the mare less attention than usual, throwing down some fodder and pouring a measure of corn into the manger.  The mare turned to that with appetite.  Corn came not amiss to Queenie, no matter at what hour it was vouchsafed her.  Her sound old teeth did not stop crunching the kernels as Sheila went out of the barn.

From the shed she secured an ax and a spade, as well as a basket.  In spite of her condition of mind she knew exactly what she wanted to do—­and she did it.  Had she thought out her intention for months she could have gone about the matter no more directly and practically.  Yet, had one stopped Sheila and asked her what she was about—­exactly what her intentions were—­the query would have found her unprepared with an answer.

Both her physical and mental condition precluded Sheila from going far from the Ball homestead.  What she had been through during these past few days had drained out of her physical vigor as well as all intellectual freshness.

When Cap’n Ira Ball had led the feebly protesting Queen of Sheba across these empty fields to her intended sacrifice, the two had made no more dreary picture against the dim dawn than did Sheila now.  She carried the bundle she had made slung over one shoulder by a length of rope.  The spade, ax, and basket balanced her figure on the other side; she bent forward as she walked and, from a distance, Prudence herself would have looked no older or more decrepit than did the girl now leaving the Ball premises.

She did not follow the same course that the captain and Queenie had followed on that memorable occasion, but took a path that led to a cart track to the beach behind John-Ed Williams’ house.  Nobody was astir anywhere on Wreckers’ Head but herself.

In an hour she arrived at the objective point toward which she had been headed from the first.  Why and how she had thought of this refuge it would be hard to tell.  Least of all could Sheila have explained her reason for coming here.  It was in her mind, it was away from all other human habitations, and she did not think anybody would have the right to drive her from it.

The cabin formerly occupied by Hosea Westcott was well above the tide, was, or could be made, perfectly dry, was roughly, if not comfortably furnished, and offered the girl a shelter in which she thought she would be safe.

To one who had spent such weary months in a narrow room in a Hanover Street lodging house, going in and out with speech with scarcely any one save the person to whom she paid her weekly dole of rent, there could be no loneliness in a place like this, where the surf soughed continually in one’s ear, a hundred feathered forms flashed by in an hour, sails dotted the dimpling sea, and the strand itself was spread thick with many varieties of nature’s wonders.