some vague end, and a distraction from certain thoughts he dared not
entertain and could not entirely dismiss. Inconceivable and inexplicable
to human reason, it might have been acceptable to the Divine omniscience
for its predestined result.

He left the road at a point where the marsh encroached upon the meadow,
familiar to him already as near the spot where he had embarked from
the Chinaman's boat the day before. He remembered that the walls of the
hacienda were distinctly visible from the tules where he had hidden all
day, and he now knew that the figures he had observed near the building,
which had deterred his first attempts at landing, must have been his
wife and his friend. 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