rell
was an unhappy woman. She had climbed to the dizziest heights of the
social ladder; her pride was more than satisfied; but her heart was
empty and desolate. Her fickle husband soon wearied of her charms, and
flaunted his fresh conquests before her face. In the royal family
circle, into which she had forced her way, she was an unwelcome
stranger; and such homage as she received was conceded to her rank and
not to herself. "Of all princesses," she once wrote to a friend, "I
really think I am the most miserable."

Her husband died at the age of forty-five, worn out with excesses,
regretted by none, execrated by many. Of his father it had been written
by way of epitaph:--

"He was alive and is dead,
And, as it is only Fred,
Why, there's no more to be said."

Henry Frederick's epitaph, if it had been written by the same hand,
would have been much more scathing. His Duchess survived him a score of
years--unhappy years of solitude and neglect, a Princess only in
name--harassed and shamed by her eldest sister, Elizabeth, a woman of
coarse tastes and language, a confirmed gambler and cheat, whose
failings, which she tried in vain to conceal, brought shame on the
Duchess.

The fate of Elizabeth--one of the "three beautiful Luttrells"--is among
the most tragic stories of the British Peerage. When her Duchess-sister
died she drifted into low companionships, was imprisoned for debt, and
actually bribed a hairdresser to marry her, in order to recover her
liberty. On the Continent, to which she escaped, she fell to still lower
depths--was arrested for pocket-picking, and for a time cleaned the
streets of Augsburg chained to a wheelbarrow, until a dose of poison set
her free from her fetters.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GORGEOUS COUNTESS

If, a century ago, Edmund Power, of Knockbrit, in County Tipperary, had
been told that his second daughter, Marguerite, would one day blossom
into a Countess, and live in history as one of the "most gorgeous"
figures in the fashionable world of London under three kings, he would
certainly have considered his prophetic informant an escaped lunatic,
and would probably have told him so, with the brutal frankness which was
one of his most amiable characteristics.

The Irish squire was a proud man--proud of his pretty and shiftless
wife, with her eternal talk of her Desmond ancestors; proud of two of
his three daughters, whose budding beauty was to win for them titled
husbands-