s sister had applied for a
warrant to "confine him as a madman and she to sit down on the estate
and take possession of it," he was generous enough to make her a
liberal allowance, and to promise that, if she married and had children,
"they would heir his estate."

Such was the state of affairs at the time this story really opens. Lady
Jean had carried her aversion to men and matrimony to middle-age, happy
enough in her independence and extravagance; while the Duke, still
unwed, remained a prey to his jealousies, his morbid fancies and his
insensate rages; and it is at this time that Colonel Stewart, the
"villain of the play," makes his appearance on the stage.

Ten years earlier, it is true, John Stewart, of Grandtully, had tried to
repair his shattered fortunes by making love to Lady Jean, who, although
then a woman of nearly forty, was still handsome enough, as he confessed
later, to "captivate my heart at the first sight of her." She was,
moreover (and this was much more to the point), a considerable heiress,
with the vast Douglas estates as good as assured to her. But to the
handsome adventurer Lady Jean turned a deaf ear, as to all her other
suitors; and the "Colonel," who had never won any army rank higher than
that of a subaltern, had to return ignominiously to the Continent, where
for another ten years he picked up a precarious living at the
gaming-tables, by borrowing or by any other low expedient that
opportunity provided to his scheming brain. The Duke of Douglas, who
cordially detested this down-at-heels cousin, called him "one of the
worst of men--a papist, a Jacobite, a gamester, a villain"--and his
career certainly seems to justify this sweeping and scathing
description.

Such was the man who now reappeared to put his fate again to the
test--and this time with such success that, to quote his own words,

"very soon after I had an obliging message from Lady Jean
telling me that, very soon after my leaving Scotland, she
came to know she had done me an injustice, but she would
acknowledge it publicly if I chose. _Enfin_, I was
allowed to visit her as formerly, and in about three
months after she honoured me with her hand."

Was ever wooing and winning so strange, so inexplicable? After refusing
some of the greatest alliances in the land, after turning her back on at
least half-a-dozen coronets, this wilful and wayward woman gives her
hand to the least desirable of all her