His intense egotism and love of gratifying self, however, came to his aid, and he argued himself into a satisfactory frame of mind by Heaven only knows what sophistry. "She doesn't care a bit about her husband," he reflected, pacing the room with measured strides, "she never did care about him, and it's a pity to see a clever woman like that tied to an unsympathetic log. With me, her life will be much happier than with him, and after he gets a divorce I will marry her, and we will live abroad, where there will be no narrow-minded bigots to scoff at what they will call her false step. I'll do it, at whatever cost! My life will be a blank without her, and she will be unhappy with Guy, so it will be far the best for both of us to come together, even at the cost of a public scandal. I'm sorry for Guy, but the one must suffer for the many, and I daresay in after years he will thank me for taking from him a wife from whom, even now, after less than two years of married life, he is estranged." So Eustace, sophist as he was, argued in favour of his dishonourable passion, and would have even succeeded in persuading himself that he was a much-injured person by having to undergo such trouble, but for a certain uneasy feeling that he ruthlessly crushed down. Having settled his plans to his own satisfaction, Eustace had another smoke, then going to the window, drew aside the curtains and looked forth into the black night. The wind was rising and whistled shrilly round the house, lashing the dark waves into lines of seething white foam which glimmered ghost-like through the gloom, while overhead the thin filmy clouds raced across the sky over the face of the haggard-looking moon. He could hear the thunder of the surge on the distant beach, the wind muttering drearily among the trees, and casting his eyes overhead he saw the pallid moonlight streaming in ghastly radiance through the ragged clouds. Dropping the curtain with a sigh, he sauntered across to the piano, and began to improvise a weird fantasy in keeping with the feelings aroused by the wild scene without. The roll of the sea, the wuthering of the wind, and the rustle of the reeds were all transmuted into strange harmonies under the touch of his skilful fingers, and stealing out at intervals from amid the tempest of sound, stole a strange, sobbing strain, fitful and wayward as the breeze, as if some malicious demon were piping heart-stealing love-songs to the sky, and the night, and the lonely marsh. He remained some time at the piano, following his changeful fancies, but when the clock struck nine he closed the instrument, and had one final pipe before going to bed. As he sat in front of the fire, looking into the heart of the burning coals, he went over again in his own mind the details of the scheme by which he hoped to secure his cousin's wife to himself. "Yes," he said aloud in the silence of the room, "it is all right! There is no flaw!"