In the mean time, Mr Bozzle had been twice to St. Diddulph’s and now he made a third journey there, two days after Stanbury’s visit.  Trevelyan, who, in truth, hated the sight of the man, and who suffered agonies in his presence, had, nevertheless, taught himself to believe that he could not live without his assistance.  That it should be so was a part of the cruelty of his lot.  Who else was there that he could trust?  His wife had renewed her intimacy with Colonel Osborne the moment that she had left him.  Mrs Stanbury, who had been represented to him as the most correct of matrons, had at once been false to him and to her trust, in allowing Colonel Osborne to enter her house.  Mr and Mrs Outhouse, with whom his wife had now located herself, not by his orders, were, of course, his enemies.  His old friend, Hugh Stanbury, had gone over to the other side, and had quarrelled with him purposely, with malice prepense, because he would not submit himself to the caprices of the wife who had injured him.  His own lawyer had refused to act for him; and his fast and oldest ally, the very person who had sounded in his ear the earliest warning note against that odious villain, whose daily work it was to destroy the peace of families, even Lady Milborough had turned against him!  Because he would not follow the stupid prescription which she, with pig-headed obstinacy, persisted in giving, because he would not carry his wife off to Naples, she was ill-judging and inconsistent enough to tell him that he was wrong!  Who was then left to him but Bozzle?  Bozzle was very disagreeable.  Bozzle said things, and made suggestions to him which were as bad as pins stuck into his flesh.  But Bozzle was true to his employer, and could find out facts.  Had it not been for Bozzle, he would have known nothing of the Colonel’s journey to Devonshire.  Had it not been for Bozzle, he would never have heard of the correspondence; and, therefore, when he left London, he gave Bozzle a roving commission; and when he went to Paris, and from Paris onwards, over the Alps into Italy, he furnished Bozzle with his address.  At this time, in the midst of all his misery, it never occurred to him to inquire of himself whether it might be possible that his old friends were right, and that he himself was wrong.  From morning to night he sang to himself melancholy silent songs of inward wailing, as to the cruelty of his own lot in life and, in the mean time, he employed Bozzle to find out for him how far that cruelty was carried.

Mr Bozzle was, of course, convinced that the lady whom he was employed to watch was no better than she ought to be.  That is the usual Bozzlian language for broken vows, secrecy, intrigue, dirt, and adultery.  It was his business to obtain evidence of her guilt.  There was no question to be solved as to her innocency.  The Bozzlian mind would have regarded any such suggestion as the product of a green softness, the possession of which would have made him quite unfit for his profession.