“Gentlemen, both your good healths and professional success also:”  here I swallowed a petit verre of brandy; thinking all the while there were worse things than the practice of physic.

“I hope you are not going,” said one, as my chaise drew up at the door.

“Business calls me,” said I, “and I can’t help it.”

“Could not you manage to see our friend here again, in a day or two?” said the rosy one.

“I fear it will be impossible,” replied I; “besides I have a notion he may not desire it.”

“I have been commissioned to hand you this,” said the tall doctor, with a half sigh, as he put a check into my hand.

I bowed slightly, and stuffed the crumpled paper with a half careless air into my waistcoat pocket, and wishing them both every species of happiness and success, shook hands four times with each, and drove off; never believing myself safe ’till I saw the gate-lodge behind me, and felt myself flying on the road to Kilkenny at about twelve miles Irish an hour.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE ELOPEMENT.

It was past two o’clock when I reached the town.  On entering the barrack-yard, I perceived a large group of officers chatting together, and every moment breaking into immoderate fits of laughter.  I went over, and immediately learned the source of their mirth, which was this:  No sooner had it been known that Fitzgerald was about to go to a distance, on a professional call, than a couple of young officers laid their heads together, and wrote an anonymous note to Mrs. Fitz. who was the very dragon of jealousy, informing her, that her husband had feigned the whole history of the patient and consultation as an excuse for absenting himself on an excursion of gallantry; and that if she wished to satisfy herself of the truth of the statement, she had only to follow him in the morning, and detect his entire scheme; the object of these amiable friends being to give poor Mrs. Fitz. a twenty miles’ jaunt, and confront her with her injured husband at the end of it.

Having a mind actively alive to suspicions of this nature, the worthy woman made all her arrangements for a start, and scarcely was the chaise and four, with her husband, out of the town, than was she on the track of it, with a heart bursting with jealousy, and vowing vengeance to the knife, against all concerned in this scheme to wrong her.

So far the plan of her persecutors had perfectly succeeded; they saw her depart, on a trip of, as they supposed, twenty miles, and their whole notions of the practical joke were limited to the eclaircissement that must ensue at the end.  Little, however, were they aware how much more nearly the suspected crime, was the position of the poor doctor to turn out; for, as by one blunder I had taken his chaise, so he, without any inquiry whatever, had got into the one intended for me; and never awoke from a most refreshing slumber, till shaken by the shoulder by the postillion, who whispered in his ear—­“here we are sir; this is the gate.”