Thereupon Maud clapped two remarkably pretty hands together in a manner highly expressive of the most light-hearted indifference, and Felicia felt that at any rate she might console herself with the reflection that Maud was as yet quite heart-whole, and that, so far as Desvœux was concerned, Sutton's prospects were not endangered. The certainty, however, that Desvœux had selected Maud for his next flirtation, and that she felt no especial repugnance to the selection, made Felicia doubly anxious that her chosen hero should succeed, and her protégée be put beyond the reach of danger as soon as possible. But then Sutton proved provokingly unamenable to Felicia's kind designs upon him.
His continued bachelorhood was a mystery of which not even she possessed the key. It was not insensibility, for every word, look, and gesture bespoke him more than ordinarily alive to all the charms which sway mankind. It certainly was not that either the wish or the power to please were wanting; nobody was more courteous at heart, or more prompt to show it, or more universally popular: nor could it be want of opportunity; for, though he had been all his life fighting, marching, hurrying on busy missions from one wild outpost to another, on guard for months together at some dangerous spot where treachery or fanaticism rendered an explosion imminent; yet the busiest military life has its intervals of quiet, and the love-making of soldiers is proverbially expeditious. Was it, then, some old romance, some far-off English recollection, some face that had fascinated his boyhood, and forbade him, when a man, to think any other altogether lovely? Could the locket, which formed the single ornament where all else was of Spartan simplicity, have told a tale of one of those catastrophes where love and hope and happiness get swamped in hopeless shipwreck? Was it that, absolutely unknown to both parties, his relations to Felicia filled too large a place in his heart for any other devotion to find room there? Was it that a widow sister who had been left with a tribe of profitless boys upon her hands, and to whom a remittance of Sutton's pay went every month, had made him think of marriage as an unattainable luxury?
Sutton, at any rate, remained without a wife, and showed no symptom of anxiety to find one. To those venturesome friends who were sufficiently familiar to rally him on the subject he replied, cheerfully enough, that his regiment was his wife and that such a turbulent existence as his would make any other sort of spouse a most inconvenient appendage. Ladies, experienced in the arts of fascination, knew instinctively that he was unassailable, and even the most intrepid and successful gave up the thoughts of conquest in despair. To be a sort of privileged brother to Felicia—to be the children's especial patron and ally—to sit chatting with Vernon far into the night with all the pleasant intimacy of family relationship, seemed to be all the domestic pleasures of which he stood in need. 'As well,' Felicia sighed, 'might some poor maiden waste her love upon the cold front of a marble Jove.'
Such was the man upon whom Felicia had essayed her first attempt at match-making; and such the man, too, whom Maud, though she had buried the secret deep in the recesses of her heart—far even out of her own sight—had already begun to love with all the passionate violence of a first attachment.
CHAPTER XIII.
DESVŒUX MAKES THE RUNNING.
Free love, free field—we love but while we may:
The woods are hushed, their music is no more;
The leaf is dead, the yearning past away,
New leaf, new life—the days of frost are o'er.
New life, new love, to suit the newer day:
New loves are sweet as those that went before,
Free love, free field—we love but while we may.
Felicia was beginning to find Maud a serious charge, and to be weighed down in spirit by the responsibility involved in her protection. It would have been easy enough to tell her not to flirt; but it was when Maud was unconscious and self-forgetful that she fascinated the most; and how warn her against the exercise of attractions of which she never thought and the existence of which would have been a surprise to her? When, on the lawn, Maud's hat blew off and all her wealth of soft brown hair tumbled about her shoulders in picturesque disarray, and she stood, bright and eager and careless of the disaster, thinking only of the fortunes of the game, but beautiful, as every creature who came near her seemed to feel—when she was merriest in the midst of merry talk, and made some saucy speech and then blushed scarlet at her own audacity—when her intensity of enjoyment in things around her bespoke itself in every look and gesture—when the pleasure she gave seemed to infect her being and she charmed others because she was herself in love with life, how warn her against all this? You might as well have preached to an April shower!