although he knew well the satisfaction of being a bachelor; but as the thought suggested itself to him, he was well aware that he was thinking of a thing quite distant from him.  The reader is not to suppose that Colonel Osborne meditated any making-away with the husband.  Our colonel was certainly not the man for a murder.  Nor did he even think of running away with his friend’s daughter.  Though he told himself that he could dispose of his wrinkles satisfactorily, still he knew himself and his powers sufficiently to be aware that he was no longer fit to be the hero of such a romance as that.  He acknowledged to himself that there was much labour to be gone through in running away with another man’s wife; and that the results, in respect to personal comfort, are not always happy.  But what if Mrs Trevelyan were to divorce herself from her husband on the score of her husband’s cruelty?  Various horrors were related as to the man’s treatment of his wife.  By some it was said that she was in the prison on Dartmoor or, if not actually in the prison, an arrangement which the prison discipline might perhaps make difficult, that she was in the custody of one of the prison warders who possessed a prim cottage and a grim wife, just outside the prison walls.  Colonel Osborne did not himself believe even so much as this, but he did believe that Mrs Trevelyan had been banished to some inhospitable region, to some dreary comfortless abode, of which, as the wife of a man of fortune, she would have great ground to complain.  So thinking, he did not probably declare to himself that a divorce should be obtained, and that, in such event, he would marry the lady, but ideas came across his mind in that direction.  Trevelyan was a cruel Bluebeard; Emily, as he was studious to call Mrs Trevelyan, was a dear injured saint.  And as for himself, though he acknowledged to himself that the lumbago pinched him now and again, so that he could not rise from his chair with all the alacrity of youth, yet, when he walked along Pall Mall with his coat properly buttoned, he could not but observe that a great many young women looked at him with admiring eyes.

It was thus with no settled scheme that the Colonel went to work, and made inquiries, and ascertained Mrs Trevelyan’s address in Devonshire.  When he learned it, he thought that he had done much; though, in truth, there had been no secrecy in the matter.  Scores of people knew Mrs Trevelyan’s address besides the newsvendor who supplied her paper, from whose boy Colonel Osborne’s servant obtained the information.  But when the information had been obtained, it was expedient that it should be used; and therefore Colonel Osborne wrote the following letter: 

’Acrobats Club, July 31, 186-

Dear Emily,’