“I suppose,” Honora further ventured, “that you are looking for a bolt of lightning, but it is late in the season for that. There are no thunder storms to speak of after September.” She turned abruptly, and Olive watched her depart, gracefully swaying against the wind. ***** All Olive's unformed opinions and attitude concerning Honora Canderay crystallized into one sharp, intelligible feeling--dislike. The breadth of being which the other had seemed to possess was now revealed as nothing more than a lack of reverence. She was inexpressibly upset by Honora's profanity, the blasphemous mind it exhibited, her attempted glossing of sin. It was nothing less. In the assault on Olive's most fundamental verities--the contempt which, she divined, had been offered to the edifice of her conscience and creed--she responded blindly, instinctively, with an overwhelming condemnation. At the same time she was frightened, and hurried away from the proximity of such unsanctified talk. She did not go to Citron Street, and the shops, as she had intended; but kept directly on until she found herself at the harbor and wharves. The latter serrated the water's edge, projecting from the relatively tall, bald warehouses, reeking with the odor of dead fish, cut open and laid in salt, grey-white areas to the sun and wind. A small group of men, with flat bronzed countenances and rough furze coats, uneasily stirred their hats, in the local manner of saluting women, and turned to gaze fixedly at her as she passed. Even in her perturbation of mind she was conscious of their unusual scrutiny. She couldn't, now, for the life of her, recall what needed to be bought; and, mounting the narrow uneven way from the water, she proceeded home. Some towels, laid on the boulder to dry, had not been sufficiently weighted, and hung blown and crumpled on a lilac bush. These she collected, rearranged, complaining of the blindness of whoever might be about the house, and then proceeded within. There, to her amazement, she found Hester, in the middle of the morning, and Rhoda bent over the dinner table, sobbing into her arm. Hester met her with a drawn face darkly smudged beneath the eyes. “The _Emerald_ was lost off the Cape,” she said; “sunk with all on board. A man came over from Salem to tell us. He had to go right back. Pa, he's lost.” Olive sank into a chair with limp hands. Rhoda continued uninterrupted her sobbing, while Hester went on with her recital in a thin, blank voice. “The ship _J. Q. Adams_ stood by the _Emerald_, but there was such a sea running she couldn't do anything else. They just had to see the _Emerald_, with the men in the rigging, go under. That's what he said who was here. They just had to see Pa drown before their eyes.... The wind was something terrible.”