of Waterloo and Quarter Bras soon after his
arrival, and his carriage, nearing the gates of the city at sunset, met
another open barouche by the side of which an officer was riding.
Osborne gave a start back, but Amelia, for it was she, though she stared
blank in his face did not know him. Her face was white and thin; her
eyes were fixed, and looked nowhere. Osborne saw who it was and hated
her--he did not know how much until he saw her there. Her carriage
passed on; a minute afterwards a horse came clattering over the pavement
behind Osborne's carriage, and Major Dobbin rode up.

"Mr. Osborne, Mr. Osborne!" cried Dobbin, while the other shouted to his
servant to drive on. "I will see you, sir; I have a message for you."

"From that woman?" said Osborne fiercely.

"No, from your son." At which Osborne fell back into his carriage and
Dobbin followed him to his hotel and up to his apartments.

"Make it short, sir," said Osborne, with an oath.

"I'm here as your son's closest friend," said the Major, "and the
executor of his will. Are you aware how small his means were, and of the
straitened circumstances of his widow? Do you know, sir, Mrs. Osborne's
condition? Her life and her reason almost have been shaken by the blow
which has fallen on her. She will be a mother soon. Will you visit the
parent's offence upon the child's head? Or will you forgive the child
for poor George's sake?"

Osborne broke into a rhapsody of self praise and imprecations. No father
in all England could have behaved more generously to a son who had
rebelled against him, and had died without even confessing he was wrong.
As for himself, he had sworn never to speak to that woman, or to
recognise her as his son's wife. "And that's what I will stick to till
the last day of my life," he concluded, with an oath.

There was no hope from that quarter then. The widow must live on her
slender pittance, or on such aid as Joseph could give her.

For six years Amelia did live on this pittance in shabby genteel poverty
with her boy and her parents in Fulham. Dobbin and Joseph Sedley were in
India now, and old Sedley, always speculating in bootless schemes, once
more brought ruin on his family.

Mr. Osborne had seen his grandson, and had formally offered to take the
boy and make him heir to the fortune intended for his father. He would
make Mrs. George Osborne an allowance, such as to assure her a decent
competency. But it must be understood that the chi