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