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 feet, seemed to show the dark, opaque meadow
beyond for a moment, and then disappeared.
Pages:
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468