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

Rest and solace have departed: winter is come--to all. She walks alone
on the beach; one may do that, "on the edge of the low rocks by the sea,
for miles";[258:1] and broods once more. She figures him beside her;
they are speaking frankly of her pain. She "will be quiet." . . .
Piteous phrase of all unquiet women! She will be quiet; she will "reason
why he is wrong." Well for her that the talk is but a fancied one; she
would not win far with such a preamble, were it real! It is thus that in
almost every word we can trace the destined failure of this loving
woman. . .