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.