most on end in horror at the
wickedness of the two wretches,--at her desire for money, sheer money;
and his for wickedness, sheer wickedness. Then her husband finds her
out,--poor Rawdon! who with all his faults and thickheaded stupidity,
has become absolutely entranced by the wiles of his little wife. He is
carried off to a sponging-house, in order that he may be out of the way,
and, on escaping unexpectedly from thraldom, finds the lord in his
wife's drawing-room. Whereupon he thrashes the old lord, nearly killing
him; takes away the plunder which he finds on his wife's person, and
hurries away to seek assistance as to further revenge;--for he is
determined to shoot the marquis, or to be shot. He goes to one Captain
Macmurdo, who is to act as his second, and there he pours out his heart.
"You don't know how fond I was of that one," Rawdon said,
half-inarticulately. "Damme, I followed her like a footman! I gave up
everything I had to her. I'm a beggar because I would marry her. By
Jove, sir, I've pawned my own watch to get her anything she fancied. And
she,--she's been making a purse for herself all the time, and grudged me
a hundred pounds to get me out of quod!" His friend alleges that the
wife may be innocent after all. "It may be so," Rawdon exclaimed sadly;
"but this don't look very innocent!" And he showed the captain the
thousand-pound note which he had found in Becky's pocketbook.

But the marquis can do better than fight; and Rawdon, in spite of his
true love, can do better than follow the quarrel up to his own undoing.
The marquis, on the spur of the moment, gets the lady's husband
appointed governor of Coventry Island, with a salary of three thousand
pounds a year; and poor Rawdon at last condescends to accept the
appointment. He will not see his wife again, but he makes her an
allowance out of his income.

In arranging all this, Thackeray is enabled to have a side blow at the
British way of distributing patronage,--for the favour of which he was
afterwards himself a candidate. He quotes as follows from _The Royalist_
newspaper: "We hear that the governorship"--of Coventry Island--"has
been offered to Colonel Rawdon Crawley, C.B., a distinguished Waterloo
officer. We need not only men of acknowledged bravery, but men of
administrative talents to superintend the affairs of our colonies; and
we have no doubt that the gentleman selected by the Colonial Office to
fill the lamented vacancy which has occurred at