beauty who is
envied by the rest of her sex."

During the summer of 1760 the unhappy lady lay at the point of death, in
her stately home at Croome Court, bravely awaiting the end.

"Until the last few days," says Mr Horace Bleackley, "the
pretty Countess lay upon a sofa, with a mirror in her
hand, gazing with yearning eyes upon the reflection of
her fading charms. To the end her ruling passion was
unchanged; for when she perceived that her beauty had
vanished she asked to be carried to bed, and called for
the room to be darkened and the curtains drawn,
permitting none to look upon her pallid face and sunken
cheeks."

Thus, robbed of all that had made life worth living, and bitterly
realising the vanity of beauty, Lady Coventry drew her last breath on
October 1st 1760. Ten days later, ten thousand persons paid their last
homage to her in Pirton churchyard.

* * * * *

Three weeks before Maria Gunning blossomed into a Countess her younger
sister Betty had been led to the altar under much more romantic
conditions, after one of the most rapid and impetuous wooings in the
annals of Love. A few weeks before she wore her wedding-ring, the man
who was to win her was not even known to her by sight; and what she had
heard of him was by no means calculated to impress her in his favour.
The Duke of Hamilton, while still young, had won for himself a very
unenviable notoriety as a debauchee in an age of profligacy. He had
drunk deep of every cup of questionable pleasure; and at an age when he
should have been in the very prime of his manhood, he was a physical
wreck, his vitality drained almost to its last drop by shameful
excesses.

Such was the man who entered the lists against a legion of formidable
rivals for the guerdon of Betty Gunning's hand. It was at a masquerade
that he first seems to have set eyes on her; and at sight of her this
jaded, worn devotee of pleasure fell headlong in love. Within an hour of
being introduced he was, Walpole says,

"making violent love to her at one end of the room, in my
Lord Chesterfield's house, while he was playing at
pharaoh at the other; that is, he neither saw the bank
nor his own cards, which were of L300 each. He soon lost
a thousand."

Such was the first meeting of the lovely Irish girl, and the man whom
she was to marry--a man who, even in the thraldom of a violent love