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.