The herd was undressing itself in a miscellaneous manner—­yawning, chaffing, cutting stupid jokes, some of them at his expense; until the process was at an end, and he could reasonably assume the fellows to be asleep, he preferred the gardens to the bachelors’ quarters.

And the free night enfolded him—­the rising moon uplifted him—­in the usual way, he being, like Deb, like Guthrie Carey, an instrument fitted to respond to their mute appeals.  Perhaps even more finely fitted than Guthrie or Deb; for he had what are called “gifts” of intellect and imagination transcending theirs—­faculties of mind which, lacking worthy use, bred in him a sort of chronic melancholy, the poetic discontent of the unappreciated and misunderstood—­a mood to which moonlight ministers as wine to the drinking fever, at once an exquisite exasperation and a divine appeasement.  He was a poet, a painter, a musician—­possibly a soldier, or a king—­possibly anything—­spoiled, blighted by that misnamed good fortune which the lucky workers who had to work so naturally and stupidly envied him.  The proper stimulus to the worthy development of the manhood latent in him had been taken from him at the start.  And now he wandered amongst his dilettantisms, dissatisfied and ineffectual.  He lived beneath himself in his common intercourse with others; he ate his 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.