Catharine stood under the little porch to look after them. Mingled sweetness and bitterness filled her mind. She pictured to herself for an instant what it would have been if she had been giving Mary to a Christian pastor of the stamp of her own father, "sound in the faith," a "believer," entering upon what had always seemed to her from her childhood the ideal and exalted life of the Christian ministry. As things were, in a few weeks, Richard Meynell would be an exile and a wanderer, chief among a regiment of banished men, driven out by force from the National Church; without any of the dignity--that dignity which had been her husband's--of voluntary renunciation. And Mary would become his wife only to share in his rebellion, his defiance, and his exile. She crossed her hands tightly upon her breast as though she were imprinting these sad facts upon her consciousness, learning to face them, to bear them with patience. And yet--in some surprising way--they did not hurt her as sharply as they would once have done. Trembling--almost in terror--she asked herself whether her own faith was weakening. And amid the intensity of aspiration and love with which her mind threw itself on the doubt, she turned back, tottering a little, to her chair by the fire. She was glad to be alone, passionately as she loved her Mary. And as she sat now following Meynell and Mary in thought along the valley, and now listening vaguely to the murmur of the fire or the stream outside, there came upon her a first gentle premonition--as though a whisper, from far away--of the solitude of death. Lines from the _Christian Year_, the book on which her girlhood had been nourished, stole into her mind: Why should we faint and fear to live alone, Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die?