rare skill and
daring, and as a profligate in petticoats.

As a child she amused all who knew her by the airs she assumed. Before
she was long out of the nursery she vowed that "she would be a Duchess,"
and a Duchess she was before she died. She was quick to learn the power
of beauty and of a clever tongue; and before she was emancipated from
short frocks she was a finished coquette.

Such was Elizabeth Chudleigh when, at fifteen, she blossomed into
precocious womanhood. Her father, the Colonel, had long been dead, and
his widow had made her home in the neighbourhood of Leicester House,
where the Prince and Princess of Wales held their Court. Here she made
the acquaintance of Mr Pulteney, later Earl of Bath, a great favourite
of the weak and dissolute Prince; and through his interest, Elizabeth,
now a radiantly lovely and supremely fascinating young woman, was
appointed a maid-of-honour to the Princess.

In the environment of a Court, surrounded by gallants, and with women
almost as lovely as herself to pit her charms against, Colonel
Chudleigh's daughter, eager to drink the cup of pleasure and of
conquest, was in her element. She was the merriest madcap in a Court
where licence was unrestrained; and she soon had high-placed lovers at
her dainty feet, including, so they say, none other than Frederick
himself. Coronets galore dazzled her eyes with their rival allurements;
but while, with tantalising coquetry, she kept them all dangling, one
alone tempted her--that which was laid at her feet by the Duke of
Hamilton, a gallant whose high rank was rivalled by his handsome face
and figure, and his many courtly accomplishments.

When the Duke asked her to be his wife she graciously consented, and her
Duchess's coronet seemed assured thus early, with a prospect of
happiness that does not always accompany it; for in this case she seems
to have given her heart where she gave her hand. For a time the course
of true love ran smoothly, and the maid-of-honour became a model of
decorum as the affianced wife of the man she loved.

But her dream of happiness was destined to be short-lived. An intriguing
aunt, Mrs Hanmer, who had no love for the Hamiltons, set to work to dash
the cup of happiness from her niece's lips. She intercepted the Duke's
letters, poured into Elizabeth's ears poisonous stories of his
infidelities and entanglements to account for his silence, and, when the
poison began to show signs of working, whisked her ni