hand. The faint glow of conquest came to her cold cheek; the slight
stirrings of pride moved her preoccupied heart. A soft light filled her
hazel eyes. A desolate woman, bereft of husband and home, and flying
through storm and night, she knew not where, she still leaned forward
towards her horse. "Was he Blue Grass, then, dear old boy?" she gently
cooed at him in the darkness. He evidently WAS, and responded by blowing
her an ostentatious equine kiss. "And he would be good to his own
forsaken Belle," she murmured caressingly, "and wouldn't let any one
harm her?" But here, overcome by the lazy witchery of her voice, he
shook his head so violently that Mrs. Tucker, after the fashion of her
sex, had the double satisfaction of demurely restraining the passion she
had evoked.
To avoid the more traveled thoroughfare, while the evening was still
early, it had been arranged that she should at first take a less direct
but less frequented road. This was a famous pleasure-drive from San
Francisco, a graveled and sanded stretch of eight miles to the sea and
an ultimate "cocktail," in a "stately pleasure-dome decreed" among the
surf and rocks of the Pacific shore. It was deserted now, and left to
the unobstructed sweep of the wind and rain. Mrs. Tucker would not have
chosen this road. With the instinctive jealousy of a bucolic inland race
born by great rivers, she did not like the sea; and again the dim and
dreary waste tended to recall the vision connected with her husband's
flight, upon which she had resolutely shut her eyes. But when she had
reached it the road suddenly turned, following the trend of the beach,
and she was exposed to the full power of its dread fascinations. The
combined roar of sea and shore was in her ears; as the direct force of
the gale had compelled her to furl the protecting hood of the buggy
to keep the light vehicle from oversetting or drifting to leeward, she
could no longer shut out the heaving chaos on the right from which the
pallid ghosts of dead and dying breakers dimly rose and sank as if in
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