When I said in this energetic way that I would follow Lady Lyndon across the Styx if necessary, of course I meant that I would do so, provided nothing more suitable presented itself in the interim.  If Lyndon would not die, where was the use of my pursuing the Countess?  And somehow, towards the end of the Spa season, very much to my mortification I do confess, the knight made another rally:  it seemed as if nothing would kill him.  ‘I am sorry for you, Captain Barry,’ he would say, laughing as usual.  ’I’m grieved to keep you, or any gentleman, waiting.  Had you not better arrange with my doctor, or get the cook to flavour my omelette with arsenic?  What are the odds, gentlemen,’ he would add, ’that I don’t live to see Captain Barry hanged yet?’

In fact, the doctors tinkered him up for a year.  ’It’s my usual luck,’ I could not help saying to my uncle, who was my confidential and most excellent adviser in all matters of the heart.  ’I’ve been wasting the treasures of my affections upon that flirt of a countess, and here’s her husband restored to health and likely to live I don’t know how many years!’ And, as if to add to my mortification, there came just at this period to Spa an English tallow-chandler’s heiress, with a plum to her fortune; and Madame Cornu, the widow of a Norman cattle-dealer and farmer-general, with a dropsy and two hundred thousand livres a year.

‘What’s the use of my following the Lyndons to England,’ says I, ’if the knight won’t die?’

‘Don’t follow them, my dear simple child,’ replied my uncle.  ’Stop here and pay court to the new arrivals.’

’Yes, and lose Calista for ever, and the greatest estate in all England.’

’Pooh, pooh! youths like you easily fire and easily despond.  Keep up a correspondence with Lady Lyndon.  You know there’s nothing she likes so much.  There’s the Irish abbe, who will write you the most charming letters for a crown apiece.  Let her go; write to her, and meanwhile look out for anything else which may turn up.  Who knows? you might marry the Norman widow, bury her, take her money, and be ready for the Countess against the knight’s death.’

And so, with vows of the most profound respectful attachment, and having given twenty louis to Lady Lyndon’s waiting-woman for a lock of her hair (of which fact, of course, the woman informed her mistress), I took leave of the Countess, when it became necessary for her return to her estates in England; swearing I would follow her as soon as an affair of honour I had on my hands could be brought to an end.

I shall pass over the events of the year that ensued before I again saw her.  She wrote to me according to promise; with much regularity at first, with somewhat less frequency afterwards.  My affairs, meanwhile, at the play-table went on not unprosperously, and I was just on the point of marrying the widow Cornu (we were at Brussels by this time, and the poor soul was madly in love with me,) when the London Gazette was put into my hands, and I read the following announcement:—­