So instant was the scene, so trance-like its mild pictorial effect, so distant from her blasted bower and her common sense of things, that Hunilla gazed and gazed, nor raised a finger or a wail.  But as good to sit thus dumb, in stupor staring on that dumb show, for all that otherwise might be done.  With half a mile of sea between, how could her two enchanted arms aid those four fated ones?  The distance long, the time one sand.  After the lightning is beheld, what fool shall stay the thunder-bolt?  Felipe’s body was washed ashore, but Truxill’s never came; only his gay, braided hat of golden straw—­that same sunflower thing he waved to her, pushing from the strand—­and now, to the last gallant, it still saluted her.  But Felipe’s body floated to the marge, with one arm encirclingly outstretched.  Lock-jawed in grim death, the lover-husband softly clasped his bride, true to her even in death’s dream.  Ah, heaven, when man thus keeps his faith, wilt thou be faithless who created the faithful one?  But they cannot break faith who never plighted it.

It needs not to be said what nameless misery now wrapped the lonely widow.  In telling her own story she passed this almost entirely over, simply recounting the event.  Construe the comment of her features as you might, from her mere words little would you have weened that Hunilla was herself the heroine of her tale.  But not thus did she defraud us of our tears.  All hearts bled that grief could be so brave.

She but showed us her soul’s lid, and the strange ciphers thereon engraved; all within, with pride’s timidity, was withheld.  Yet was there one exception.  Holding out her small olive hand before her captain, she said in mild and slowest Spanish, “Senor, I buried him;” then paused, struggled as against the writhed coilings of a snake, and cringing suddenly, leaped up, repeating in impassioned pain, “I buried him, my life, my soul!”

Doubtless, it was by half-unconscious, automatic motions of her hands, that this heavy-hearted one performed the final office for Felipe, and planted a rude cross of withered sticks—­no green ones might be had—­at the head of that lonely grave, where rested now in lasting un-complaint and quiet haven he whom untranquil seas had overthrown.

But some dull sense of another body that should be interred, of another cross that should hallow another grave—­unmade as yet—­some dull anxiety and pain touching her undiscovered brother, now haunted the oppressed Hunilla.  Her hands fresh from the burial earth, she slowly went back to the beach, with unshaped purposes wandering there, her spell-bound eye bent upon the incessant waves.  But they bore nothing to her but a dirge, which maddened her to think that murderers should mourn.  As time went by, and these things came less dreamingly to her mind, the strong persuasions of her Romish faith, which sets peculiar store by consecrated urns, prompted her to resume in waking earnest that pious search