The salt smell of the sea met her, strong with reek of kelp, as she approached its thunder through the willows. The range of sea and sky, the free wind blowing between, gave her release from thought and scope to act. The tide was running in high and full. Where the first bold bluff jutted out, a distance of some six yards, the sliding foam already lapped the rock. Once around the turn of the bluff, the beach lay before her—a long white, empty sweep under black cliffs.
She rode at an easy canter, breathing in the stinging salt air, looking out upon the water, where the dark “seaward line” swung with the swell a mile out in “the channel.” She had lost the choking tears, the despair of her first rush down the Monticito road. She felt not happy, but wildly at liberty. The wind took her hat, and she laughed, seeing it spin down the beach. The tingling breeze in her hair whipped out the short, springy curls. The high animal spirits that had helped her over situations where a less vital woman would have been overwhelmed had begun to reassert themselves in the exercise and open air. She scanned the empty beach perspective. What a gallop to the far point! She touched the mare, then pulled her up sharply in the first bound. The beach was not empty. Some one was riding—perhaps a quarter of a mile in front of her—imperfectly to be distinguished among the scattered rocks.
Her first thought was “Walter!” Trembling with eagerness, she peered under a sheltering hand. The rider was a woman. In the revulsion of her feeling, Blanche’s disappointment was an inarticulate sound. All her misery was back upon her. Who it was, riding slowly down the beach in a direction similar to her own, did not matter. She only wanted to avoid being seen—hatless, red-eyed, wild—by this woman, who, being a woman, was her natural enemy. She rode slowly, cautiously, hoping the other would quicken her pace, and put the next point between them. The sun had fallen into the fog, from under which the ocean thundered sullen, gray, up the shore.
Blanche wanted to get around the next point before dusk. She saw the horse in front—bright sorrel on the yellowish-white sand—drawing slowly near the black shoulder of rock; finally, fairly at the turn of it. In an instant it would be out of sight. No, it had stopped; stood motionless a full minute; then, to the girl’s intense amazement, wheeled and came back down the beach at a quick lope. There seemed something of vexation in the sharp turn-about.
Had the woman seen, and come back to speak with her? Blanche wondered. There was no avoiding the meeting. Shaking her hair over her eyes, she rode forward. As the rider drew nearer, with a contraction of heart she recognized Lillian Gueste. At the same instant she knew that Lillian had not seen her.
Mrs. Gueste’s face wore a preoccupied, a vexed, a vaguely anxious, look. The sand half quenched the sound of the horse’s coming. They were almost abreast before she saw Blanche Remi, and then it was with a start, a stare of keen surprise, of interrogation, that effaced the first expression.
Blanche knew whom the questioning eyes missed. There was about them a subtle, tantalizing suggestion of Walter, and she felt the blood run in her temples as she bent her head in faint recognition.
Mrs. Gueste stopped.
“Where is my brother?” she said. She fairly challenged the other with it. That she did not name him Mr. Carter was a mark of her extreme surprise, alarm; for Blanche Remi, with discolored eyes, disheveled hair, and the red stains across her face, looked wild enough to have thrust a displeasing lover into the sea.
Blanche looked at and realized how she hated this woman, this unruffled perfection. The strength of her feeling frightened herself. But her voice was as cool as Mrs. Gueste’s.