Queens; but her appearances at Court, the
scene of so many triumphs, were as few as she could make them.

For the rest her days were spent in retirement, among her beloved books
and pictures and cats; until, after thirty years of widowhood, full of
years and wearied of life's vanities, she was laid to rest in her ducal
robes in Westminster Abbey. The bulk of her enormous fortune went to her
nephew, Lord Blantyre, with a direction that he should purchase with
part of it an estate, to be known as "Lennox's Love to Blantyre"; and to
this day "Lennox-Love" perpetuates, like the Britannia of our coins, the
memory of one of the most beautiful and tantalising women who have ever
driven men to distraction by their beauty.

CHAPTER II

THE NIGHTINGALE OF BATH

A century and a half ago Bath had reached the zenith of her fame and
allurement, not only as "Queen of the West," but as Empress of all the
haunts of pleasure in England. She drew, as by an irresistible magnet,
rank and beauty and wealth to her shrine. In her famous Assembly Rooms,
statesmen rubbed shoulders with card-sharpers, Marquises with swell
mobsmen, and Countesses with courtesans, all in eager quest of pleasure
or conquest or gain. The Bath season was England's carnival, when cares
and ceremonial alike were thrown to the winds, when the pleasure of the
moment was the only ambition worth pursuing, and when even the prudish
found a fearful joy in playing hide-and-seek with vice.

But although the fairest women in the land flocked to Bath, by common
consent not one of them all was so beautiful and bewitching as Elizabeth
Ann Linley, the girl-nightingale, whose voice entranced the ear daily at
the Assembly Rooms concerts as her loveliness feasted the eye. She was,
as all the world knew, only the daughter of Thomas Linley,
singing-master and organiser of the concerts, a man who had plied
chisel and saw at the carpenter's bench before he found the music that
was in him; but, obscure as was her birth, she reigned supreme by virtue
of a loveliness and a gift of song which none of her sex could rival.

It is thus little wonder that Elizabeth Linley's fame had travelled far
beyond the West Country town in which she was cradled. George III. had
summoned her to sing to him in his London palace, and had been so
overcome by her gifts of beauty and melody that, with tears streaming
down his cheeks, he had stroked her hair and caressed her hands, and
declared to the