The news of Maud's engagement was naturally a congenial topic for gossip in Dustypore. The romantic circumstances under which it had come about lent themselves readily to the superaddition of any details, necessary, in the teller's opinion, in order to bring the story to the correct pitch of embellishment. Everybody considered Maud a lucky girl; some cynics remarked that once again Sutton had shown himself the most courageous of mankind; and Mrs. Vereker said, sentimentally, that she feared poor Desvoeux would _this time_ be really broken-hearted. There was some satire lurking in the words 'this time,' because the present occasion was by no means the first on which the same sort of thing had occurred. Desvoeux's was one of those inconveniently adjusted temperaments to which no woman is completely delightful till she has become unattainable. His relations to the opposite sex did not as a general rule appear to involve anything of a seriously pathetic order; but no sooner was a girl engaged to some one else than he awoke to the terrible discovery that he was deeply in love with her himself and deeply aggrieved by her betrothal to another. He was known not to be a marrying man; he made no secret of his dislike of matrimony as an institution; still he greatly resented other people's marriages. Whenever any ladies of his acquaintance got married he used to send them the most lovely bridal presents, with beautiful little gilt-edged notes on the finest satin paper, politely intimating that he was broken-hearted. Sometimes his feelings were too much for prose and his melancholy would break out into epigrammatic versicles; sometimes the gift bore only an inscription eloquent in its reticence--'_Le don d'un triste célibataire_,' or '_Avec un soupir_.' The presents, however, were so very pretty (for Desvoeux's tastes were of the extravagant order), that their fair recipients, for the most part, were glad enough to take them, sighs, poetry and all, without inquiring too rigidly into the giver's actual frame of mind. As most of the young ladies who had for some years past been married at Dustypore had experienced something of the sort, they probably compared notes and reassured each other as to the probability of a disease, from which Desvoeux had already more than once recovered, not proving fatal on any subsequent occasion.