The following day, as I was dressing to ride out, my servant announced no less a person than Mr. Mark Anthony Fitzpatrick, who said “that he came upon a little business, and must see me immediately.”

Mr. Fitzpatrick, upon being announced, speedily opened his negociation by asking in very terse and unequivocal phrase, my intentions regarding his sister-in-law.  After professing the most perfect astonishment at the question, and its possible import, I replied, that she was a most charming person, with whom I intended to have nothing whatever to do.

“And maybe you never proposed for her at the ball last night?”

“Propose for a lady at a ball the first time I ever met her!”

“Just so.  Can you carry your memory so far back? or, perhaps I had better refresh it;” and he here repeated the whole substance of my conversation on the way homeward, sometimes in the very words I used.

“But, my dear sir, the young lady could never have supposed I used such language as this you have repeated?”

“So, then, you intend to break off?  Well, then, it’s right to tell you that you’re in a very ugly scrape, for it was my wife you took home last night—­not Miss Moriarty; and I leave you to choose at your leisure whether you’d rather be defendant in a suit for breach of promise or seduction; and, upon my conscience, I think it’s civil in me to give you a choice.”

What a pretty disclosure was here!  So that while I was imaging myself squeezing the hand and winning the heart of the fair Mary Anne, I was merely making a case of strong evidence for a jury, that might expose me to the world, and half ruin me in damages.  There was but one course open—­to make a fight for it; and, from what I saw of my friend Mark Anthony, this did not seem difficult.

I accordingly assumed a high tone—­laughed at the entire affair—­said it was a “way we had in the army”—­that “we never meant any thing by it,” &c. &c.

In a few minutes I perceived the bait was taking.  Mr. Fitzpatrick’s west country blood was up:  all thought of the legal resource was abandoned; and he flung out of the room to find a friend, I having given him the name of “one of ours” as mine upon the occasion.

Very little time was lost, for before three o’clock that afternoon a meeting was fixed for the following morning at the North Bull; and I had the satisfaction of hearing that I only escaped the malignant eloquence of Holmes in the King’s Bench, to be “blazed” at by the best shot on the western circuit.  The thought was no way agreeable, and I indemnified myself for the scrape by a very satisfactory anathema upon the high sheriff and his ball, and his confounded saucepans; for to the lady’s sympathy for my sufferings I attributed much of my folly.

At eight the next morning I found myself standing with Curzon and the doctor upon that bleak portion of her majesty’s dominion they term the North Bull, waiting in a chilly rain, and a raw fog, till it pleased Mark Anthony Fitzpatrick, to come and shoot me—­such being the precise terms of our combat, in the opinion of all parties.