If you ask me, Mr Trewilyan, I don’t think it’s ripe yet for the court, but we’ll have it ripe before long.  I’ll keep a look-out, because it’s just possible she may leave town.  If she do, I’ll be down upon them together, and no mistake.

Yours most respectful,

S. Bozzle.’

Every word in the letter had been a dagger to Trevelyan, and yet he felt himself to be under an obligation to the man who had written it.  No one else would or could make facts known to him.  If she were innocent, let him know that she were innocent, and he would proclaim her innocence, and believe in her innocence and sacrifice himself to her innocence, if such sacrifice were necessary.  But if she were guilty, let him also know that.  He knew how bad it was, all that bribing of postmen and maidservants, who took his money, and her money also, very likely.  It was dirt, all of it.  But who had put him into the dirt?  His wife had, at least, deceived him had deceived him and disobeyed him, and it was necessary that he should know the facts.  Life without a Bozzle would now have been to him a perfect blank.

The Colonel had been to the parsonage at St. Diddulph’s, and had been admitted!  As to that he had no doubt.  Nor did he really doubt that his wife had seen the visitor.  He had sent his wife first into a remote village on Dartmoor, and there she had been visited by her lover!  How was he to use any other word?  Iago, oh, Iago!  The pity of it, Iago!  Then, when she had learned that this was discovered, she had left the retreat in which he had placed her without permission from him and had taken herself to the house of a relative of hers.  Here she was visited again by her lover!  Oh, Iago; the pity of it, Iago!  And then there had been between them an almost constant correspondence.  So much he had ascertained as fact; but he did not for a moment believe that Bozzle had learned all the facts.  There might be correspondence, or even visits, of which Bozzle could learn nothing.  How could Bozzle know where Mrs Trevelyan was during all those hours which Colonel Osborne passed in London?  That which he knew, he knew absolutely, and on that he could act; but there was, of course, much of which he knew nothing.  Gradually the truth would unveil itself, and then he would act.  He would tear that Colonel into fragments, and throw his wife from him with all the ignominy which the law made possible to him.

But in the meantime he wrote a letter to Mr Outhouse.  Colonel Osborne, after all that had been said, had been admitted at the parsonage, and Trevelyan was determined to let the clergyman know what he thought about it.  The oftener he turned the matter in his mind, as he walked slowly up and down the piazza of St. Mark, the more absurd it appeared to him to doubt that his wife had seen the man.  Of course she had seen him.  He walked there nearly the whole night, thinking of it, and as he dragged himself off at last to his inn, had almost come to have but