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 to Mrs.Trevelyan,--that this ancient Lothario had before this made himself troublesome in more than one family.

He was fond of intimacies with married ladies, and perhaps was not averse to the excitement of marital hostility.

It must be remembered, however, that the hostility to which allusion is here made was not the hostility of the pistol or the horsewhip,--nor, indeed, was it generally the hostility of a word of spoken anger.

A young husband may dislike the too-friendly bearing of a friend, and may yet abstain from that outrage on his own dignity and on his wife, which is conveyed by a word of suspicion.

Louis Trevelyan having taken a strong dislike to Colonel Osborne, and having failed to make his wife understand that this dislike should have induced her to throw cold water upon the Colonel's friendship, had allowed himself to speak a word which probably he would have willingly recalled as soon as spoken.