heart when he was alone.

Unconsciously, by force of habit, he selected the most comfortable and
cleanly of the garden-seats, and made sure that the best of cigars was
drawing perfectly, before he gave himself to his meditations on this
particular moonlight night. Then he began to think of Deb--in the same
new way that Carey had begun to think of her after discovering a
dangerous rival in the field. To Claud, Guthrie was dangerous in his
rude bulk and strength, the knitted brute power that the sea and his
hard life had given him; to Guthrie, Claud was dangerous in the
highbred beauty and finish of his person, clothes and manners, and in
the astounding "cleverness" that he displayed. Each man feared the
force of those qualities which he lacked himself, and was secretly
ashamed of lacking.

Claud Dalzell considered this matter of the rival--not a probable but a
possible rival--seriously, for the first time. Hitherto he had had an
easy mind in his relations with the beauty of the countryside. She was
his for all he wanted of her. And feeling this, he had taken no steps
to register his claim; he had not even yet proposed to her. Matrimony
was not a fashionable institution--it was, indeed, a jest--in his set.
A young man with a heap of money was not expected to tie himself down
as if he were a poor clerk on a hundred a year. The conditions of club
life, with as many domestic hearths to visit as he wished, and to stay
away from when he chose, the luxury and freedom of pampered
bachelorhood, had not only been deemed appropriate, but necessary to
his peculiar needs and organisation. He had not considered himself a
marrying man. But now the new idea came to him--to make his rights in
Deb secure.

Certainly he could not contemplate the possibility of doing without
her. He had loved her that much for years. Within the last day or two
he had loved her twice that much. And now the moonlight showed him his
love enthroned above all his lesser loves--a thing of heaven, where
they were of the earth--consecrated a great passion, to lift him out of
himself. He sat and smoked, spiritually bemused, his brain running like
a fountain with melodies of music and poetry, notes and words that sang
in his ears and murmured on his lips without his hearing them. So a
distant curlew thrilled him to a more ecstatic melancholy with its call
through the moon-transfigured world, and he did not notice it. All the
influences of the gentle night contrib