When the rustling of her passage through the thicket ceased, she could hear the neighbour crashing of breakers. Black Rock Head rose to the north of the rocky cove, home of Dempster’s boat. Southward stood other headlands, and southern-most, Wrecker’s Point, where all the fury of surges driven by the southeast gale would be felt. When the mingled mist, spray, and rain were drifted away for a moment, and shrank to give space to a great, howling blast, she could see a lofty white ghostly object, like a ship in full sail, dimly visible, suddenly lift itself against the dark front of the Head. Then it sank away, dashed to nothingness of foamy wreck. A hollow roar came, as the cavernous cleft of the Head was overcrowded with the breaker, and, gushing up, the mass of uprising waters overwhelmed the promontory and, spreading, mantled over its smooth surfaces and tore in many cataracts down its chasms to the sea. The Head, through veils of mist, seemed like a distant dome mountain of snow. Black Rock Head was evidently unapproachable, so Miss Sullivan faced the blast and its blinding, driving spray, for a sheltered spot farther on toward Wrecker’s Point. She found that her foreground of vision of storm-experiences was crowding itself with quite unsatisfactory detail. There was no sieve of trees by the shore to filter the salt showers. Sometimes there was but a narrow path between slippery slopes of grass and rounded rocks glistening with the touch of the more ambitious breakers. As she passed by these perilous places, an unlooked-for wash of water would come hungrily up and hasten hungrily back, willing to sweep away fragile womanhood. The morning was well advanced when, with slow and difficult progress, the lady who, after her bold vigour of devotion to her object, merits, at least for the nonce, the title of our heroine, reached Wrecker’s Point. 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.