There was no hunting, of course, for Dorothy this season, not even in so mild a form as cubbing, and, amorous of solitude, she often used to walk by herself to Clarehaven; there, on one of those green headlands that had withstood the sea when the fortifications of Clare had crumbled in the foaming tide, she would sit by the hour, drinking in from the salt blast strength and endurance for this son of hers dedicate from the womb to his country and to his order. On those wild days the little church, which belonged to the dim origins of the family and had been built by sea-rovers to abide in their hearts while they were seafaring, became a true shrine for her. She would take refuge there from the fury of the storm, and there sit in an ancient chair bleached and worm-eaten, her eyes fixed upon that east window stained by nothing save spindrift and scud from the sea. The wind would howl and shriek, would rattle at the hasps of the narrow windows like hands entreating shelter, would drum and whistle and moan by the old oaken doors, while Dorothy sat in a stillness of gray light, herself radiant with that first beauty of coming motherhood before the weary months of waiting have begun to drag the cheeks. There for hours she would sit, her eyes shining, her neck blue-veined with blood coursing to reinforce the second life that was in the making, her complexion not paragoned by the petal of any rose in all the roses that ever had or ever would bloom at Clare. Everything in the little church had taken on a luminous gray from the open space of light by which it was surrounded. The altar was of granite; the candlesticks of pewter; the crucifix of silver. Wise with all his follies, the rector had chosen this church to express whatever, still untainted by expediency or snobbery, was left of his inmost aspirations, and here he had allowed nothing to affront the stark simplicity of such architecture. Here there were no chrysanthemums in brazen vases, only sprigs of sea-holly gathered by children on the salt edge of the downs, sea-holly from the fled summer that preserved the illusion of having been gathered yesterday. The benches had not been varnished; year by year they had slowly assumed that desiccated appearance of age which gives to wood thus mellowed a strangely immaterial look, a lightness and a grace, rough-hewn though it be, that varnished wood never acquires. In this building, wrought, it seemed, by labor of wind and cloud, of air and rain, Dorothy's coloring exceeded richness; when the yellow winter sun shone through the landward windows the effulgence mingled with the hue of her cheeks to incarnadine the very air around her and blush upon the stones beyond. How often had she sat thus in meditation upon nothing except the power and strength of her unborn son! Could her husband wait beside her in this church where his pirate ancestors, dripping with sea-water, had thanked God for their