But he was in every respect a man very different from Sir Marmaduke.

Sir Marmaduke, blessed and at the same time burdened as he was with a wife and eight daughters, and condemned as he had been to pass a large portion of his life within the tropics, had become at fifty what many people call quite a middle-aged man.
That is to say, he was one from whom the effervescence and elasticity and salt of youth had altogether passed away.

He was fat and slow, thinking much of his wife and eight daughters, thinking much also of his dinner.

Now Colonel Osborne was a bachelor, with no burdens but those imposed upon him by his position as a member of Parliament,--a man of fortune to whom the world had been very easy.

It was not therefore said so decidedly of him as of Sir Marmaduke, that he was a middle-aged man, although he had probably already lived more than two-thirds of his life.