of Bulow’s, or anything, so as to get rid of her.  To return, however, to the story.  Sir Charles, with his complication of ills, was dying before us by inches! and I’ve no doubt it could not have been very pleasant to him to see a young handsome fellow paying court to his widow before his own face as it were.  After I once got into the house on the transubstantiation dispute, I found a dozen more occasions to improve my intimacy, and was scarcely ever out of her Ladyship’s doors.  The world talked and blustered; but what cared I?  The men cried fie upon the shameless Irish adventurer; but I have told my way of silencing such envious people:  and my sword had by this time got such a reputation through Europe, that few people cared to encounter it.  If I can once get my hold of a place, I keep it.  Many’s the house I have been to where I have seen the men avoid me.  ‘Faugh! the low Irishman,’ they would say.  ’Bah! the coarse adventurer!’ ‘Out on the insufferable blackleg and puppy!’ and so forth.  This hatred has been of no inconsiderable service to me in the world; for when I fasten on a man, nothing can induce me to release my hold:  and I am left to myself, which is all the better.  As I told Lady Lyndon in those days, with perfect sincerity, ‘Calista’ (I used to call her Calista in my correspondence)—­’ Calista, I swear to thee, by the spotlessness of thy own soul, by the brilliancy of thy immitigable eyes, by everything pure and chaste in heaven and in thy own heart, that I will never cease from following thee!  Scorn I can bear, and have borne at thy hands.  Indifference I can surmount; ’tis a rock which my energy will climb over, a magnet which attracts the dauntless iron of my soul!’ And it was true, I wouldn’t have left her—­no, though they had kicked me downstairs every day I presented myself at her door.

That is my way of fascinating women.  Let the man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim.  Attacking is his only secret.  Dare, and the world always yields:  or, if it beat you sometimes, dare again, and it will succumb.  In those days my spirit was so great, that if I had set my heart upon marrying a princess of the blood, I would have had her!

I told Calista my story, and altered very very little of the truth.  My object was to frighten her:  to show her that what I wanted, that I dared; that what I dared, that I won; and there were striking passages enough in my history to convince her of my iron will and indomitable courage.  ‘Never hope to escape me, madam,’ I would say:  ’offer to marry another man, and he dies upon this sword, which never yet met its master.  Fly from me, and I will follow you, though it were to the gates of Hades.’  I promise you this was very different language to that she had been in the habit of hearing from her Jemmy-Jessamy adorers.  You should have seen how I scared the fellows from her.