’Yes; you can do this.  You can go to him from me, and can tell him that I have chosen you as a messenger because you are his friend.  You can tell him that I am willing to obey him in anything.  If he chooses, I will consent that Colonel Osborne shall be asked never to come into my presence again.  It will be very absurd; but if he chooses, I will consent.  Or I will let things go on as they are, and continue to receive my father’s old friend when he comes.  But if I do, I will not put up with an imputation on my conduct because he does not like the way in which the gentleman thinks fit to address me.  I take upon myself to say that if any man alive spoke to me as he ought not to speak, I should know how to resent it myself.  But I cannot fly into a passion with an old gentleman for calling me by my Christian name, when he has done so habitually for years.’

From all this it will appear that the great godsend of a rich marriage, with all manner of attendant comforts, which had come in the way of the Rowley family as they were living at the Mandarins, had not turned out to be an unmixed blessing.  In the matter of the quarrel, as it had hitherto progressed, the husband had perhaps been more in the wrong than his wife; but the wife, in spite of all her promises of perfect obedience, had proved herself to be a woman very hard to manage.  Had she been earnest in her desire to please her lord and master in this matter of Colonel Osborne’s visits, to please him even after he had so vacillated in his own behests, she might probably have so received the man as to have quelled all feeling of jealousy in her husband’s bosom.  But instead of doing so she had told herself that as she was innocent, and as her innocence had been acknowledged, and as she had been specially instructed to receive this man whom she had before been specially instructed not to receive, she would now fall back exactly into her old manner with him.  She had told Colonel Osborne never to allude to that meeting in the park, and to ask no creature as to what had occasioned her conduct on that Sunday; thus having a mystery with him, which of course he understood as well as she did.  And then she had again taken to writing notes to him and receiving notes from him—­none of which she showed to her husband.  She was more intimate with him than ever, and yet she hardly ever mentioned his name to her husband.  Trevelyan, acknowledging to himself that he had done no good by his former interference, feeling that he had put himself in the wrong on that occasion, and that his wife had got the better of him, had borne with all this with soreness and a moody savageness of general conduct, but still without further words of anger with reference to the man himself.  But now, on this Sunday, when his wife had been closeted with Colonel Osborne in the back drawing-room, leaving him with his sister-in-law, his temper had become too hot for him, and he had suddenly left the house, declaring that he would not walk with the two women on that day.  ‘Why not, Louis?’ his wife had said, coming up to him.  ’Never mind why not, but I shall not,’ he had answered; and then he left the room.