That hope is crushed when, on the voyage across the Atlantic, Roderick reveals that just before leaving he asked Miss Garland to marry him and she accepted. "...You came and put me into such ridiculous good-humor," Roderick tells Mallet, "that I felt an extraordinary desire to tell some woman that I adored her." Mallet listens to all this with the feeling that fortune has played an elaborately devised trick on him; that just as he had finally found love, it had been stolen away because of his own act of generosity.