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. DESVOEUX 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!