Those days spent in watching the deer, already snow-flecked to match the dappled sunlight of the woods, had been so enriched by contemplation of the active grace and beauty of these wild things that Dorothy discovered in herself a new affection for Tony, an affection born of gratitude to him, because it was he who had given her all this. He came back on a murmurous afternoon of mid-May. Dorothy was sitting upon the summit of a knoll where a few tall beeches scarcely troubled the sunlight with their high fans of lucent green. Beneath her ran a meadow threaded with the gold of cowslips, and while she stared into cuckoo-haunted distances she heard above the buzzing of the bees the sound of his car. Starting up, she waved to him, so that he stopped the car and ran up the slope to greet her. "Why, Doodles, what's the matter?" he exclaimed. "You've been crying." He was embarrassed by her hot wet cheeks when she pressed them to his. "No, they're happy tears," she said. "I was thinking of him and that one day all this will be his." She caught the landscape in a gesture. "All the autumn, Tony, I prayed for him to be great and strong, and all the winter that he might be great and good. Now I think I should be happy if he did nothing more remarkable than love this land--his land. Tony, don't you feel how wonderful it is that you and I should give somebody all this?" Formerly, when Dorothy had talked about their son, the father had not been able to grasp that there would ever be such a person. Now in this month before the birth he experienced a sudden awe in regarding his wife. That embrace she had given him for welcome, her figure, the look in her eyes--they were strange to him; she was strange to him--a new mysterious creature that awed him as an abstraction of womanhood, not as a lovely girl that granted or refused him kisses. "I say, Doodles, I feel an awful brute for going away like that." She laughed lightly. "You needn't. I was happier alone. Don't look so disconsolate. I'm glad you've come now." "I didn't stay up for the Derby," he pleaded, in extenuation of his neglect. She laughed again. "Tony, you haven't yet heard his name. I've chosen Lucius." "That's a rum name. Why Latin all of a sudden? Or if Latin, why not Marcus Antoninus, don't you know?" "It's a name I like very much." He looked at her suspiciously. "Who did you know called Lucius?" "Nobody. It's a name I like. That's all." "You promise me you never knew anybody called Lucius?" He had caught her hand. "Never." "All right. You can have it." But the nimbus round her motherhood was for the husband melted by the breath of jealousy. Let children come to interrupt their love, she would be his again soon; and what trumpery she made of those women with whom he had played in London as a lonely child plays with dolls.