The dowager's loss of her mother was followed in March by a blow that upset her more profoundly. During a fierce gale a large elm-tree in Little Cherrington churchyard was blown down and in its fall broke the Burne-Jones window that commemorated the fourth earl. It was no great loss to art, but the effect upon the dowager was tremendous. The shock of seeing the irreverent winds of March blowing through that colored screen she had set up between herself and the reality of her husband destroyed the figment of him that her pampered imagination had elaborated, and she remembered him as he was--an ill-tempered gambler, a drunken spendthrift, always with that fixed leer of ataxy for a pretty woman ... she remembered how once she had overheard somebody say that Clarehaven was now a rake without a handle. Her conscience was pricked; she must warn Dorothy of what the Clare inheritance might include. "Dorothy dear," she implored. "I don't like to seem interfering, but I do beg you not to leave Tony alone too much. I fear for him. I--" with whispers and head-shakes she poured out the true story of her married life. But Dorothy, with her whole being concentrated upon that unborn son, had no vigilance to waste on Tony. If he should go to the bad, let him go. The sins of the fourth earl and the follies of the fifth should all be forgotten in that paragon the sixth. At the same time, the dowager's story left its mark on Dorothy; thenceforward, when she paced the long picture-gallery of Clare, she would often ask herself in affright what passions and vices, what weakness, shame, and folly, had been cloaked by those painted forms of ancestors. She would give him her flesh; but he must inherit from them also; from those unblinking eyes he must derive some of the gleams in his own. But it should be from his mother that he derived most ... then she caught her breath. If that were so he would have in him something of Gilbert Caffyn, of that hypocrite her father. When the dowager's window was broken air was let in upon Dorothy's painted screen as well. She was honest with herself on those mornings when she paced the long gallery; she made no more pretense of romantic origins; the Lonsdale bugle-horn was cracked and useless. By what she was should her son live, not by what she liked to think she might be. Some of the strength that she had summoned for him during those autumnal hours in the little church by the sea she begged now for herself; while she defied those frigid glances that ever watched her progress up and down, up and down that long gallery, she stripped herself of all sham glories and for the sake of him within her dedicated herself to truth. Lady Godiva, riding naked through the streets of Coventry, was not more heroic than Dorothy riding naked through her own mind for the sake of that Lucius-Clare-to-be called by courtesy Viscount Clare.