nearly
black, but which were in truth so varying in colour, that you could
not tell their hue. Her brown hair was very dark and very soft; and
the tint of her complexion was brown also, though the colour of her
cheeks was often so bright as to induce her enemies to say falsely of
her that she painted them. And she was very strong, as are some girls
who come from the tropics, and whom a tropical climate has suited.
She could sit on her horse the whole day long, and would never be
weary with dancing at the Government House balls. When Colonel
Osborne was introduced to her as the baby whom he had known, he
thought it would be very pleasant to be intimate with so pleasant a
friend,--meaning no harm indeed, as but few men do mean harm on such
occasions,--but still, not regarding the beautiful young woman whom
he had seen as one of a generation succeeding to that of his own, to
whom it would be his duty to make himself useful on account of the
old friendship which he bore to her father.

It was, moreover, well known in London,--though not known at all
to Mrs. Trevelyan,--that this ancient Lothario had before this
made himself troublesome in more than one family. He was fond of
intimacies with married ladies, and perhaps was not averse to the
excitement of marital hostility. It must be remembered, however, that
the hostility to which allusion is here made was not the hostility
of the pistol or the horsewhip,--nor, indeed, was it generally the
hostility of a word of spoken anger. A young husband may dislike
the too-friendly bearing of a friend, and may yet abstain from that
outrage on his own dignity and on his wife, which is conveyed by a
word of suspicion. Louis Trevelyan having taken a strong dislike to
Colonel Osborne, and having failed to make his wife understand that
this dislike should have induced her to throw cold water upon the
Colonel's friendship, had allowed himself to speak a word which
probably he would have willingly recalled as soon as spoken. But
words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who
has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express
that regret. So it was with Louis Trevelyan when he told his wife
that he did not wish Colonel Osborne to come so often to his house.
He had said it with a flashing eye and an angry tone; and though she
had seen the eye flash before, and was familiar with the angry tone,
she had never before felt herself to be insulted by her husband