For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had been a Convent
in the fifteenth century, and probably long before, the South Welsh home
of his mother's girlhood, perched in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a
wide shelf of the headland that commands the treacherous shoals and snowy
shell-strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nantmadoc Bay ... Plas
Bendigaid, with that hoarded, invested money, was to be Saxham's bequest
to his young widow.

Everything that loving care and forethought could plan had already been
done to make the old home pleasant and charming. Nothing was needed but
the upholsterer's finishing touches. Saxham had planned that Lynette
should be there when he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping that
promise made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little more than a year
before.

He had always meant to keep it, but not when the north-east gales of
winter and spring should be sweeping over the mountain-passes and lashing
the waves to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds
should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black
ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous
heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur
and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of
snow-helmed Frore and her daughters.

When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled in sweetness, Saxham
would keep his promise. When the swallows should hatch out their young
broods between the huge stones that the hands of men who returned to dust
cycles of centuries ago hauled up with the twisted hide-rope and the
groaning crane, to rear with them upon the jut of the rugged headland two
hundred feet above the waves that now break a mile away, the Lonely Tower,
now merged in the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep that broods over Herion.
When those blocks of cyclopaean masonry should be tufted with the golden
wallflower and the perfumed wild geranium, and starred with the delicate
blossom of the lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the little
blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the big whisky-flask
should come into use.

When the vast pale sweep of the sandy dunes should be covered for leagues
by the perfumed cloth-of-gold spread by the broom and the furze; when the
innumerable little yellow dwarf-roses should blossom on their prickly
bushes, thrusting pertly through the powdery white sand, a