The irony of it seizes her. Those sailors need not curse them! Ships safe in port have their own perils of rot and rust and worms in the wood that gnaw the heart to dust. . . . "That is worse." And how long the house has stood here, to anger the drenched, stark men on the sea! Who lived here before this couple came? Did another woman before herself watch the man "with whom began love's voyage full-sail" . . . watch him and see the planks of love's ship start, and hell open beneath? _This_ mood she speaks not, only sits and broods upon. And he? Men too can watch, and struggle with themselves, and feel that little help is given them. Some sailors come safe home, and these would have been lighted by the ruddy casement. But she thinks only of the sailors drowning, and gnashing their teeth for hate of the "warm safe house." That melancholy brooding--and if she but looked lovely while she broods. . . . III.--IN THE DOORWAY She stands alone in the doorway, and looks out upon the dreary autumn landscape.[257:1] It is a grey October day; the sea is in "stripes like a snake"--olive-pale near the land, black and "spotted white with the wind" in the distance. How ominous it shows: good fortune is surely on the wing. "Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!" As she gazes, her heart dies within her. Their fig-tree has lost all the golden glint of summer; the vines "writhe in rows, each impaled on its stake"--and like the leaves of the tree, and like the vines, her heart "shrivels up and her spirit shrinks curled." But courage, courage! Winter comes to all--not to them alone. And have they not love, and a house big enough to hold them, with its four rooms, and the field there, red and rough, not yielding now, but again to yield? Rabbits and magpies, though now they find no food there (the magpies already have well-nigh deserted it; when one _does_ alight, it seems an event), yet will again find food. But November--the chill month with its "rebuff"--will see both rabbits and magpies quite departed. . . . No! This shall not be her mood. Winter comes indeed to mere material nature; God means precisely that the spirit shall inherit His power to put life into the darkness and the cold. The spirit defies external change: "Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange!" And she turns to go in, for the hour at rest and solaced. They have the house, and the field . . . and love. IV.--ALONG THE BEACH