Flora, she was arrested and imprisoned for five months on
English vessels of war. After her release she was married, in 1750; and
she and her husband sailed for the American colonies just before the
Revolution. In that war Macdonald became a British officer and served
against his adopted countrymen. Perhaps because of this reason Flora
returned alone to Scotland, where she died at the age of sixty-eight.

The royal prince who would have given her his easy love lived a life of
far less dignity in the years that followed his return to France. There
was no more hope of recovering the English throne. For him there were
left only the idle and licentious diversions of such a court as that in
which his father lived.

At the death of James III., even this court was disintegrated, and
Prince Charles led a roving life under the title of Earl of Albany. In
his wanderings he met Louise Marie, the daughter of a German prince,
Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg. She was only nineteen years of age when
she first felt the fascination that he still possessed; but it was an
unhappy marriage for the girl when she discovered that her husband was
a confirmed drunkard.

Not long after, in fact, she found her life with him so utterly
intolerable that she persuaded the Pope to allow her a formal
separation. The pontiff intrusted her to her husband's brother,
Cardinal York, who placed her in a convent and presently removed her to
his own residence in Rome.

Here begins another romance. She was often visited by Vittorio Alfieri,
the great Italian poet and dramatist. Alfieri was a man of wealth. In
early years he divided his time into alternate periods during which he
either studied hard in civil and canonical law, or was a constant
attendant upon the race-course, or rushed aimlessly all over Europe
without any object except to wear out the post-horses which he used in
relays over hundreds of miles of road. His life, indeed, was eccentric
almost to insanity; but when he had met the beautiful and lonely
Countess of Albany there came over him a striking change. She
influenced him for all that was good, and he used to say that he owed
her all that was best in his dramatic works.

Sixteen years after her marriage her royal husband died, a worn-out,
bloated wreck of one who had been as a youth a model of knightliness
and manhood. During his final years he had fallen to utter destitution,
and there was either a touch of half contempt or a feeling of re