d with the projected marriage of her son with Lady
Jean Douglas, "a young lady whom she had heard much commended before she
saw her, and who since had lost no ground with her"; and, no doubt, the
fair Douglas would have become Dalkeith's Countess had it not been for
the treacherous intervention of Her Grace of Queensberry, whose heart
was set on the Earl marrying her sister-in-law.

The marriage day had actually been fixed when a letter was placed in
Lady Jean's hand, when on her way to the Court--a letter in which the
Earl claimed his release as he no longer loved her. That the letter was
a clever forgery never occurred to Lady Jean, who was so crushed by it
that it is said she fled in disguise to France to hide her shame and her
humiliation. Such was the tragic ending to Lady Jean's first romance,
which gave her such a distrust of man and such a distaste for matrimony
that for thirty years she vowed she would listen to no avowal of love,
however tempting.

During the long period, while youth was slipping from her, Lady Jean
appears to have lived alone at Drumsheugh House, near Edinburgh, where
she made herself highly popular by her affability, admired for her gifts
and graces of mind, and courted for her rank and her lavish
hospitality--paying occasional visits to her brother, the Duke of
Douglas, whose devotion to her was only equalled by the alarm his
eccentric behaviour and his mad fits of jealousy and temper inspired in
her. That the Duke, who is described as "a person of the most wretched
intellect, proud, ignorant, and silly, passionate, spiteful and
unforgiving," was scarcely sane is proved by many a story, one alone of
which is sufficient to prove that his mind must have been unbalanced.
Once when Captain Ker, a distant cousin, was a guest at the castle, he
ventured to remonstrate with his host on allowing his servants,
especially one called Stockbrigg, to rule over him; whereupon

"the poor Duke," to quote Woodrow, "who for many years
had been crazed in his brain, told this familiar, who
persuaded him that such an insult could only be wiped out
in blood. On which the Duke proceeded to Ker's room and
stabbed him as he was sleeping."

It is little wonder that Lady Jean declined to live with a brother who
was thus a slave to his own servants and to a temper so insane; but
although their lives were led apart, and although, among many other mad
delusions, the Duke was convinced that hi