When the ladies were upstairs in the drawing-room, Lady Milborough
contrived to seat herself on a couch intended for two persons only,
close to Mrs Trevelyan. Emily, thinking that she might perhaps hear
some advice about Guinness's stout, prepared herself to be saucy.
But the matter in hand was graver than that. Lady Milborough's mind
was uneasy about Colonel Osborne.

'My dear,' said she, 'was not your father very intimate with that
Colonel Osborne?'

'He is very intimate with him, Lady Milborough.'

'Ah, yes; I thought I had heard so. That makes it of course natural
that you should know him.'

'We have known him all our lives,' said Emily, forgetting probably
that out of the twenty-three years and some months which she had
hitherto lived, there had been a consecutive period of more than
twenty years in which she had never seen this man whom she had
known all her life.

'That makes a difference, of course; and I don't mean to say anything
against him.'

'I hope not, Lady Milborough, because we are all especially fond
of him.' This was said with so much of purpose, that poor, dear
old Lady Milborough was stopped in her good work. She knew well
the terrible strait to which Augustus Poole had been brought with
his wife, although nobody supposed that Poole's wife had ever