As a bachelor he might count himself rich, and for a bachelor Beechhurst was an admirable dwelling-place. The house had been built for a bachelor. The rooms were spacious but few. Twice as many bedrooms, best and secondary, would be required for a family man. Thinking vaguely of the possibility of marriage, Allan had shuddered as he thought of an architect exploring that delightful upper floor, measuring walls, and tapping partitions, and discussing the best point at which to throw out a nursery wing, and where to add three or four servants' bedrooms. And behold now this prudent, far-seeing young man, whose philosophy hitherto had been the philosophy of pure selfishness, was allowing himself to fall in love with a young lady who, for all he could tell, might be just as mercenary and worldly-minded as the girls he had met in Suffolk shooting-parties or in London ball-rooms. He had no reason to suppose her any better than they. Her father was a man of moderate means, and according to all the rules of modern life, it would be her duty to make a good marriage. He remembered how Mrs. Mornington had ordered her niece to save a dance for him, and he might conclude from that and other small facts that the aunt would favour him as a suitor for the niece. Yet the idea of worldly-mindedness never entered his thoughts in relation to Suzette. He abandoned himself to the charm of her delightful individuality without the faintest apprehension of future disillusion. He thought, indeed, but little of the future. The joys of the present were all-sufficing. To talk with her in unrestrained frivolity, glancing from theme to theme, but always with a grain of sentiment or philosophy in their talk; to walk beside her in those stately alleys at Discombe, or to linger in the marble temple; to follow the peacocks along the grass walks; to look for the nests of the thrushes and blackbirds in the thick walls of laurel; to plan garden-plays--Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream--in that grassy amphitheatre, which reminded Allan of the Boboli Gardens--these things made a happiness that filled mind and heart to the exclusion of all thought of the future. "I can understand the lilies better now than when I was first told to consider them," said Allan one day, as he stood with Suzette beside a great bed of lilium auratum. "How do you mean?" "Because I am as happy as they are, and take no more heed of the future than they do. I feel as they feel when they sway in the summer wind and bask in the summer sun, fed with the dews of night, having all things that are good for flowers, satisfied and happy."