face within the gate, how free he makes with our wine, generally
abusing it, how he tells our eldest daughter to light his candle
for him, how he gave silver cups when the girls were born, and now
bestows tea-services as they get married--a most useful, safe, and
charming fellow, not a year younger-looking or more nimble than
ourselves, without whom life would be very blank. We all know that
man; but such a man was not Colonel Osborne in the house of Mr
Trevelyan's young bride.

Emily Rowley, when she was brought home from the Mandarin Islands
to be the wife of Louis Trevelyan, was a very handsome young woman,
tall, with a bust rather full for her age, with dark eyes eyes that
looked to be dark because her eye-brows and eye-lashes were nearly
black, but which were in truth so varying in colour that you could
not tell their hue. Her brown hair was very dark and very soft;
and the tint of her complexion was brown also, though the colour
of her cheeks was often so bright as to induce her enemies to say
falsely of her that she painted them. And she was very strong,
as are some girls who come from the tropics, and whom a tropical
climate has suited. She could sit on her horse the whole day long,
and would never be weary with dancing at the Government House balls.
When Colonel Osborne was introduced to her as the baby whom he had
known, he thought it would be very pleasant to be intimate with so
pleasant a friend, meaning no harm indeed, as but few men do mean
harm on such occasions, but still, not regarding the beautiful
young woman whom he had seen as one of a generation succeeding to
that of his own, to whom it would be his duty to make himself useful
on account of the old friendship which he bore to her father.

It was, moreover, well known in London though not known at all