The poor boy’s letter did not say much.  He had been too proud to acknowledge the tenderness which his heart felt.  He only said that on the eve of a great battle he wished to bid his father farewell, and solemnly to implore his good offices for the wife—­it might be for the child—­whom he had left behind.  His English habit, pride, awkwardness, perhaps, had prevented him from saying more.  His father could not see the kiss George had placed on the superscription of his letter.  Mr. Osborne dropped it with the bitterest, deadliest pang of balked affection and revenge.  His son was still beloved and unforgiven.

Two months afterwards an elaborate funeral monument to the memory of Captain George Osborne appeared on the wall of the church which Mr. Osborne attended, and in the autumn the old man went to Belgium.  George’s widow was still in Brussels, and very many of the brave —­th, recovering of their wounds.  The city was a vast military hospital for months after the great battle.

Mr. Osborne made the journey of Waterloo and Quarter Bras soon after his arrival, and his carriage, nearing the gates of the city at sunset, met another open barouche by the side of which an officer was riding.  Osborne gave a start back, but Amelia, for it was she, though she stared blank in his face did not know him.  Her face was white and thin; her eyes were fixed, and looked nowhere.  Osborne saw who it was and hated her—­he did not know how much until he saw her there.  Her carriage passed on; a minute afterwards a horse came clattering over the pavement behind Osborne’s carriage, and Major Dobbin rode up.

“Mr. Osborne, Mr. Osborne!” cried Dobbin, while the other shouted to his servant to drive on.  “I will see you, sir; I have a message for you.”

“From that woman?” said Osborne fiercely.

“No, from your son.”  At which Osborne fell back into his carriage and Dobbin followed him to his hotel and up to his apartments.

“Make it short, sir,” said Osborne, with an oath.

“I’m here as your son’s closest friend,” said the Major, “and the executor of his will.  Are you aware how small his means were, and of the straitened circumstances of his widow?  Do you know, sir, Mrs. Osborne’s condition?  Her life and her reason almost have been shaken by the blow which has fallen on her.  She will be a mother soon.  Will you visit the parent’s offence upon the child’s head?  Or will you forgive the child for poor George’s sake?”

Osborne broke into a rhapsody of self praise and imprecations.  No father in all England could have behaved more generously to a son who had rebelled against him, and had died without even confessing he was wrong.  As for himself, he had sworn never to speak to that woman, or to recognise her as his son’s wife.  “And that’s what I will stick to till the last day of my life,” he concluded, with an oath.

There was no hope from that quarter then.  The widow must live on her slender pittance, or on such aid as Joseph could give her.