For six years Amelia did live on this pittance in shabby genteel poverty with her boy and her parents in Fulham.  Dobbin and Joseph Sedley were in India now, and old Sedley, always speculating in bootless schemes, once more brought ruin on his family.

Mr. Osborne had seen his grandson, and had formally offered to take the boy and make him heir to the fortune intended for his father.  He would make Mrs. George Osborne an allowance, such as to assure her a decent competency.  But it must be understood that the child would live entirely with his grandfather in Russell Square, and that he would be occasionally permitted to see Mrs. George Osborne at her own residence.

At first Amelia rejected the offer with indignation.  It was only on the knowledge that her father, in his speculations, had made away with the annuity from Joseph that poverty and misery made her capitulate.  Her own, pittance would barely enable her to support her parents, and would not suffice for her son.

“What!  Mrs. Pride has come down, has she?” old Osborne said when with a tremulous, eager voice, Miss Osborne, the only unmarried daughter, read him Amelia’s letter.

“Regular starve out, hey? ha, ha!  I knew she would.”  He tried to keep his dignity, as he chuckled and swore to himself behind his paper.

“Get the room over mine—­his room that was—­ready.  And you had better send that woman some money,” Mr. Osborne said before he went out.  “She shan’t want for nothing.  Send her a hundred pound.  But she don’t come in here, mind.  No, not for all the money in London.”

A few days are past, and the great event of Amelia’s life is consummated.  The child is sacrificed and offered up to fate, and the widow is quite alone.

It was about this time when the Rawdon Crawleys, after contriving to live well on nothing a year, for a considerable period, came to smash.  Rawdon retired to the Governorship of Coventry Island, a post procured for him by the influence of that great nobleman the Marquis of Steyne, and who cared what became of Becky?  It was said she went to Naples.  Rawdon certainly declined to be reconciled to her, because of the money she had received from Lord Steyne and which she had concealed from her husband.  “If she’s not guilty, she’s as bad as guilty; and I’ll never see her again—­never,” he said.

IV.—­Colonel Dobbin Leaves the Army

Good fortune began to smile upon Amelia when Joseph Sedley, once more came back to England, a rich man, and with him Major Dobbin.  But the round of decorous pleasure in which the Sedley family now indulged was soon broken by Mrs. Sedley’s death, and old Sedley was not long in following his wife whither she had preceded him.

A change was coming over old Osborne’s mind.  He found that Major Dobbin was a distinguished officer, and one day looking into his grandson’s accounts he learnt that it was out of William Dobbin’s own pocket the fund had been supplied upon which the poor widow and the child had subsisted.