met each other, though one was the brother-in-law of Sir Marmaduke Rowley, and the other had been his very old friend.  ‘My name, Mr Outhouse, is Colonel Osborne,’ said the visitor, coming forward, with his hand out.  The clergyman, of course, took his hand, and asked him to be seated.  ’We have known each other’s names very long,’ continued the Colonel, ’though I do not think we have ever yet had an opportunity of becoming acquainted.’

‘No,’ said Mr Outhouse; ‘we have never been acquainted, I believe.’  He might have added, that he had no desire whatever to make such acquaintance; and his manner, over which he himself had no control, did almost say as much.  Indeed, this coming to his house of the suspected lover of his niece appeared to him to be a heavy addition to his troubles; for, although he was disposed to take his niece’s part against her husband to any possible length, even to the locking up of the husband as a madman, if it were possible, nevertheless he had almost as great a horror of the Colonel, as though the husband’s allegations as to the lover had been true as gospel.  Because Trevelyan had been wrong altogether, Colonel Osborne was not the less wrong.  Because Trevelyan’s suspicions were to Mr Outhouse wicked and groundless, he did not the less regard the presumed lover to be an iniquitous roaring lion, going about seeking whom he might devour.  Elderly, unmarried men of fashion generally, and especially colonels, and majors, and members of parliament, and such like, were to him as black sheep or roaring lions.  They were fruges consumere nati; men who stood on club doorsteps talking naughtily and doing nothing, wearing sleek clothing, for which they very often did not pay, and never going to church.  It seemed to him in his ignorance that such men had none of the burdens of this world upon their shoulders, and that, therefore, they stood in great peril of the burdens of the next.  It was, doubtless, his special duty to deal with men in such peril; but those wicked ones with whom he was concerned were those whom he could reach.  Now, the Colonel Osbornes of the earth were not to be got at by any clergyman, or, as far as Mr Outhouse could see, by any means of grace.  That story of the rich man and the camel seemed to him to be specially applicable to such people.  How was such a one as Colonel Osborne to be shewn the way through the eye of a needle?  To Mr Outhouse, his own brother-in-law, Sir Marmaduke, was almost of the same class for he frequented clubs when in London, and played whist, and talked of the things of the world such as the Derby, and the levees, and West-end dinner parties as though they were all in all to him.  He, to be sure, was weighted with so large a family that there might be hope for him.  The eye of the needle could not be closed against him as a rich man; but he savoured of the West-end, and was worldly, and consorted with such men as this Colonel Osborne.  When Colonel Osborne introduced himself to Mr Outhouse, it was almost as though Apollyon had made his way into the parsonage of St. Diddulph’s.