his comrade certainly suspected, but preferred to
ignore. William was too much hurt or ashamed to ask to fathom that
disgraceful mystery, although once, and evidently with remorse on his
mind, George had alluded to it. It was on the morning of Waterloo, as
the young men stood together in front of their line, surveying the
black masses of Frenchmen who crowned the opposite heights, and as the
rain was coming down, "I have been mixing in a foolish intrigue with a
woman," George said. "I am glad we were marched away. If I drop, I
hope Emmy will never know of that business. I wish to God it had never
been begun!" And William was pleased to think, and had more than once
soothed poor George's widow with the narrative, that Osborne, after
quitting his wife, and after the action of Quatre Bras, on the first
day, spoke gravely and affectionately to his comrade of his father and
his wife. On these facts, too, William had insisted very strongly in
his conversations with the elder Osborne, and had thus been the means
of reconciling the old gentleman to his son's memory, just at the close
of the elder man's life.

"And so this devil is still going on with her intrigues," thought
William. "I wish she were a hundred miles from here. She brings
mischief wherever she goes." And he was pursuing these forebodings and
this uncomfortable train of thought, with his head between his hands,
and the Pumpernickel Gazette of last week unread under his nose, when
somebody tapped his shoulder with a parasol, and he looked up and saw
Mrs. Amelia.

This woman had a way of tyrannizing over Major Dobbin (for the weakest
of all people will domineer over somebody), and she ordered him about,
and patted him, and made him fetch and carry just as if he was a great
Newfoundland dog. He liked, so to speak, to jump into the water if she
said "High, Dobbin!" and to trot behind her with her reticule in his
mouth. This history has been written to very little purpose if the
reader has not perceived that the Major was a spooney.

"Why did you not wait for me, sir, to escort me downstairs?" she said,
giving a little toss of her head and a most sarcastic curtsey.

"I couldn't stand up in the passage," he answered with a comical
deprecatory look; and, delighted to give her his arm and to take her
out of the horrid smoky place, he would have walked off without even so
much as remembering the waiter, had not the young fellow run after him
and stopped him on