of such instances, she will bewail it.  But when such painful jealous doubts annoy the husband, the man who is in the way will almost always feel himself justified in extracting a slightly pleasurable sensation from the transaction.  He will say to himself probably, unconsciously indeed, and with no formed words, that the husband is an ass, an ass if he be in a twitter either for that which he has kept or for that which he has been unable to keep, that the lady has shewn a good deal of appreciation, and that he himself is is is quite a Captain Bold of Halifax!  All the while he will not have the slightest intention of wronging the husband’s honour, and will have received no greater favour from the intimacy accorded to him than the privilege of running on one day to Marshall and Snellgrove’s, the haberdashers, and on another to Handcocks’, the jewellers.  If he be allowed to buy a present or two, or to pay a few shillings here or there, he has achieved much.  Terrible things now and again do occur, even here in England; but women, with us, are slow to burn their household gods.  It happens, however, occasionally, as we are all aware, that the outward garments of a domestic deity will be a little scorched; and when this occurs, the man who is the interloper will generally find a gentle consolation in his position, let its interest be ever so flaccid and unreal, and its troubles in running about, and the like, ever so considerable and time-destructive.

It was so certainly with Colonel Osborne when he became aware that his intimacy with Mrs Trevelyan had caused her husband uneasiness.  He was not especially a vicious man, and had now, as we know, reached a time of life when such vice as that in question might be supposed to have lost its charm for him.  A gentleman over fifty, popular in London, with a seat in Parliament, fond of good dinners, and possessed of everything which the world has to give, could hardly have wished to run away with his neighbour’s wife, or to have destroyed the happiness of his old friend’s daughter.  Such wickedness had never come into his head; but he had a certain pleasure in being the confidential friend of a very pretty woman; and when he heard that that pretty woman’s husband was jealous, the pleasure was enhanced rather than otherwise.  On that Sunday, as he had left the house in Curzon Street, he had told Stanbury that Trevelyan had just gone off in a huff, which was true enough, and he had walked from thence down Clarges Street, and across Piccadilly to St. James’s Street, with a jauntier step than usual, because he was aware that he himself had been the occasion of that trouble.  This was very wrong; but there is reason to believe that many such men as Colonel Osborne, who are bachelors at fifty, are equally malicious.