Over and over again she recalled all that Ida May Bostwick had said to and of her. It was all true! Coarse and unfeeling as the shopgirl was, Sheila lashed her troubled soul with the thought that what Ida May had said was deserved. Neither circumstances nor the fact that Tunis had suggested the masquerade excused the transgression.
The days of her waiting on fate, alone in the cabin under Wreckers' Head, gave no surcease to her mental castigation. Her sin loomed the more huge as the hours dragged their slow length by.
And yet, with it all, Sheila's keenest anguish came through her renunciation of Tunis' love. She could see no possible way of holding to that if she would purge herself of the fault she had committed.
And above the stain of her false position since she had come to the Cape was the overcloud of that accusation which had first warped Sheila Macklin's life and humbled her spirit. She believed that she could never escape the shame of that prosecution and punishment for a crime she had not committed.
She believed that, no matter where she might go nor how blamelessly she might live, the fact that she had been sentenced to a woman's reformatory would crop up like the ugly memory of a horrid dream to embitter her existence. Was her life linked with Tunis Latham's, he must suffer also from that misfortune.
And so Sheila Macklin waited from hour to hour, from day to day, dully and in a brooding spirit, for release from a situation which must in time embitter her whole nature.
From the cabin at the foot of the seaward bluff of Wreckers' Head, the coming of the black gale out of the northeast was watched anxiously by Sheila, from the very break of this day. Tunis might be on the sea. She doubted if the threat of bad weather would hold the Seamew in port.
There was no rain—just a wind which tore across the waste of waters within view of her station, scattering their crests in foam and spoondrift, and rolling them in huger and still huger breakers on the strand. It was a magnificent sight, but a terrifying one as well. The girl watched almost continually for a white patch against the black of the storm which might mark a sailing craft in peril.
Steam vessels went past, several of them. They, surely, were in little danger, were their hulls ordinarily sound and their engines perfect. All the fishing craft had made for cover the night before. The New York-Boston steamers would keep to the inside passage in this gale.