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
awful salutation. At times through the darkness a white sheet appeared
spread before the path and beneath the wheels of the buggy, which, when
withdrawn with a reluctant hiss, seemed striving to drag the exhausted
beach seaward with it.
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