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