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Of seeing much that storms may do she had had her heart’s desire. All the dread fury of maddened winds had burst upon her till she had tottered back to some shelter of intervening rock, appalled at tempest terrors that houselings never know. In tremulous pauses, when the gale was still, she had heard the coming thunder of the long breaker, coming awfully because an infinite ocean drove it on; and as this went bursting like an upward avalanche from crag to crag beyond, in the silence while the next billow was lifting she had heard those dreadful ocean voices surrounding her, a wild atmosphere of remorse—of remorse unpardoned and forever unpardonable for all the murderous wrongs of ocean to the world. And after these came the bewildering whirl of spray and rain, the crash, the hissing fall, and then the great blow of the breaker like a knell. It hammered at the world’s foundations, until that solid world seemed an unstable thing to tread.

The rain had ceased when Miss Sullivan reached the Point. It was clearing, and she could look more widely over the immense agitation and sway of the lurid sea. She sat for an hour or wandered about over perils of wave-worn crags, that waves were now striving vainly to shatter. At last she remembered that she had the beach still to visit before her return. Her path thither was through a wood, tangled and bewildering with vines and underbrush. The storm was now almost a calm, but the thunder of the surges followed her as she hastened along the dripping trail. Penetrating slowly through the wood by paths of uneasy footing, she began to distinguish the distant part of the beach. It formed one end of a parallelogram, whose sides were dark ranges of low, broken precipice and the farther end the blank of sea. Opposite her, the precipice continued up into a wooded mountain. The sun was just breaking forth and scattering a slender, illumined scarf of mist, that wavered in among the trees of the mountain-side, and melted into that ever-fresh wonder of beauty, the calm sky of summer.