till their father came, and he recognised the truth of what his wife said.  There they were, and there they must remain throughout the winter.  It was hard upon him, especially as the difficulties and embarrassments as to money were so disagreeable to him, but there was no help for it.  His duty must be done though it were ever so painful.  Then that horrid Colonel had come.  And now had come this letter, in which he was not only accused of being an accomplice between his married niece and her lover, but was also assured that he should be held up to public ignominy and disgrace.  Though he had often declared that Trevelyan was mad, he would not remember that now.  Such a letter as he had received should have been treated by him as the production of a madman.  But he was not sane enough himself to see the matter in that light.  He gnashed his teeth, and clenched his fist, and was almost beside himself as he read the letter a second time.

There had been a method in Trevelyan’s madness; for, though he had declared to himself that without doubt Bozzle had been right in saying that as the Colonel had been at the parsonage, therefore, as a certainty, Mrs Trevelyan had met the Colonel there, yet he had not so stated in his letter.  He had merely asserted that Colonel Osborne had been at the house, and had founded his accusation upon that alleged fact.  The alleged fact had been in truth a fact.  So far Bozzle had been right.  The Colonel had been at the parsonage; and the reader knows how far Mr Outhouse had been to blame for his share in the matter!  He rushed off to his wife with the letter, declaring at first that Mrs Trevelyan, Nora, and the child, and the servant, should be sent out of the house at once.  But at last Mrs Outhouse succeeded in showing him that he would not be justified in ill-using them because Trevelyan had ill-used him.  ‘But I will write to him,’ said Mr Outhouse.  ’He shall know what I think about it.’  And he did write his letter that day, in spite of his wife’s entreaties that he would allow the sun to set upon his wrath.  And his letter was as follows: 

’St. Diddulph’s, October 8, 186-.

’Sir,

I have received your letter of the 4th, which is more iniquitous, unjust, and ungrateful, than anything I ever before saw written.  I have been surprised from the first at your gross cruelty to your unoffending wife; but even that seems to me more intelligible than your conduct in writing such words as those which you have dared to send to me.

For your wife’s sake, knowing that she is in a great degree still in your power, I will condescend to tell you what has happened.  When Mrs Trevelyan found herself constrained to leave Nuncombe Putney by your aspersions on her character, she came here, to the protection of her nearest relatives within reach, till her father and mother should be in England.  Sorely against my will I received them into my home, because they had been deprived of other shelter by