England, so anxious was she to obliterate that fatal
episode in the dark church, she made a journey with certain friends to
Lainston, and, while the vicar's back was turned, tore the fatal page
out of the marriage register.

Meanwhile, the naval lieutenant had blossomed into an Earl, on his
father's death; and when the new Earl, her husband, showed signs of
failing health, and there was an early prospect of graduating as a
wealthy dowager Countess, she saw the wisdom of making another journey
to Lainston to replace the record of her marriage. Alas, for her
scheming; the moribund Earl took a new lease of life, and the gilded
dowagerhood became nebulous and remote again.

But Elizabeth Chudleigh was not to be long baulked in her ambitious
designs. Though her charms had grown too opulent and were faded--for she
was now near her fiftieth birthday--she was able to count among her
slaves the aged Duke of Kingston, an amiable and weak old gentleman of
enormous wealth, and with one accommodating foot already "in the grave."

Wife, or no wife, she now made up her mind to be a Duchess at last. She
appealed to Lord Bristol, the husband from whom she had so long been
estranged, to divorce her, even going so far as to offer to qualify for
the divorce by an open and flagrant act of infidelity; but his lordship
only shrugged a scornful shoulder. Still, not to be thwarted, she
brought a suit of jactitation of marriage, and, by a lavish use of
bribes and cajolery, got a sentence from the Ecclesiastical Court which
at last set her free. Within a month she had blossomed into "the most
high and _puissante_ Princess, the Duchess of Kingston," thus realising
her childish ambition.

For four and a half years the Duchess was a dignified pattern of all the
virtues. The passions of youth had lost their fires; the scenes of
revelry and coarse dissipation to which they had given birth were only a
memory. She would yet die in the odour of sanctity, however tardy. But
storms were brewing, and the Duke's death, in 1746, precipitated them,
though not before she had had another fling with the riches he left to
her.

Throwing aside her widow's weeds, she flung herself again--old, obese,
and faded as she was--into a round of dissipation which shocked and
disgusted even London, accustomed as it was to the vagaries of the
"quality," until she was glad to escape from the storm of censure she
had brought on her head.

She bought a magnificent yacht an