eavily some day in the scale between France and England. Charles Edward
must marry, and provide a worthier successor to his empty honours.

And thus it was that France came to the exiled Prince with the
seductive offer of a pretty bride and a pension of forty thousand crowns
a year. The besotted Charles jumped at the offer; left his brandy
bottle, and, with the alacrity of a youthful lover, rushed away to woo
and win the bride who had been chosen for him.

And never surely was there such a grotesque wooing. Charles was a
physical wreck of fifty-two; his bride-elect had only seen nineteen
summers. The daughter of Prince Gustav Adolf of Stolberg and the
Countess of Horn, Princess Louise was kin to many of the greatest houses
in Europe, from the Colonnas and Orsinis to the Hohenzollerns and
Bruces. In blood she was thus at least a match for her Stuart
bridegroom.

She had spent some years in the seclusion of a monastery, and had
emerged for her undesired trip to the altar a young woman of rare beauty
and charm, with glorious brown eyes, the delicate tint of the wild rose
in her dimpled cheeks, a wealth of golden hair, and a figure every line
and movement of which was instinct with beauty and grace. She was a
fresh, unspoilt child, bubbling with gaiety and the joy of life, and her
dainty little head was full of the romance of sweet nineteen.

Such then was the singularly contrasted couple--"Beauty and the Beast"
they were dubbed by many--who stood together at the altar at Macerata on
Good Friday of the year 1772--the bridegroom, "looking hideous in his
wedding suit of crimson silk," in flaming contrast to the virginal white
of his pretty victim. It needed no such day of ill-omen as a Friday to
inaugurate a union which could not have been otherwise than
disastrous--the union of a beautiful, romantic girl eager to exploit the
world of freedom and of pleasure, and a drink-sodden man old enough to
be her father, for whom life had long lost all its illusions.

It is true that for a time Charles Edward was drawn from his bottle by
the lure of a pretty and winsome wife, who should, if any power on earth
could, have made a man again of him. She laughed, indeed, at his maudlin
tales of past heroism and adventure in love and battle; to her he was a
plaster hero, and she let him know it. She was "mated to a clown," and a
drunken clown to boot--and, well, she would make the best of a bad
bargain. If her husband was the sorriest lov