The afternoon waned, bringing with it the slight chill which, at the
summer's end, begins to mark the shortening days. She turned her face
homeward, and by this time became conscious that if Verena's companion
had not yet brought her back there might be ground for uneasiness as to
what had happened to them. It seemed to her that no sail-boat could have
put into the town without passing more or less before her eyes and
showing her whom it carried; she had seen a dozen, freighted only with
the figures of men. An accident was perfectly possible (what could
Ransom, with his plantation habits, know about the management of a
sail?), and once that danger loomed before her--the signal loveliness of
the weather had prevented its striking her before--Olive's imagination
hurried, with a bound, to the worst. She saw the boat overturned and
drifting out to sea, and (after a week of nameless horror) the body of
an unknown young woman, defaced beyond recognition, but with long auburn
hair and in a white dress, washed up in some far-away cove. An hour
before, her mind had rested with a sort of relief on the idea that
Verena should sink for ever beneath the horizon, so that their
tremendous trouble might never be; but now, with the lateness of the
hour, a sharp, immediate anxiety took the place of that intended
resignation; and she quickened her step, with a heart that galloped too
as she went. Then it was, above all, that she felt how _she_ had
understood friendship, and how never again to see the face of the
creature she had taken to her soul would be for her as the stroke of
blindness.
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