eye got worse and worse, and so interfered with the sight of the
other that he had no peace till it was darkened wholly. He tried
another doctor--Monsieur Goyers, professor at the liberal university
of Ghent--who consulted with Dr. Noiret about him one day in
Brussels, and afterwards told him that Noiret of Louvain, whom he
described as a miserable Jesuit, was blinding him, and that he, this
Goyers of Ghent, would cure him in six weeks.

"Mettez-vous au regime des viandes saignantes!" had said Noiret; and
Barty had put himself on a diet of underdone beef and mutton.

"Mettez-vous au lait!" said Goyers--so he metted himself at the
milk, as he called it--and put himself in Goyers's hands; and in six
weeks got so much worse that he went back to Noiret and the regimen
of the bleeding meats, which he loathed.

Then, in his long and wretched _desoeuvrement_, his melancholia, he
drifted into an indiscreet flirtation with a beautiful lady--he (as
had happened before) being more the pursued than the pursuer. And so
ardent was the pursuit that one fine morning the beautiful lady
found herself gravely compromised--and there was a bother and a row.

"Amour, amour, quand tu nous tiens,
On peut bien dire 'Adieu Prudence!'"

All this gave Lady Caroline great distress, and ended most
unhappily--in a duel with the lady's husband, who was a Colonel of
Artillery, and meant business!

They fought with swords in a little wood near Laeken. Barty, who
could have run his fat antagonist through a dozen times during the
five minutes they fought, allowed himself to be badly wounded in the
side, just above the hip, and spent a month in bed. He had hoped to
manage for himself a slighter wound, and catch his adversary's point
on his elbow.

Afterwards, Lady Caroline, who had so disapproved of the flirtation,
did not, strange to say, so disapprove of this bloody encounter, and
thoroughly approved of the way Barty had let himself be pinked! And
nursed him devotedly; no mother could have nursed him better--no
sister--no wife! not even the wife of that Belgian Colonel of
Artillery!

[Illustration: BARTY GIVES HIMSELF AWAY]

"Il s'est conduit en homme de coeur!" said the good Abbe.

"Il s'est conduit en bon gentilhomme!" said the aristocratic Father
Louis, of the princely house of Aremberg.

On the other hand, young de Cleves the dragoon, and Monsieur Jean
the Viscount, who had served as Barty's seconds (I was in America),
were v