rs later the young Earl gasped his life out in the
tavern, where he had drunk "not wisely, but too well."

Thus a drunken brawl, following on a funeral, made a widow of the
beautiful Countess of Strathmore just when life was at its brightest and
best, and when the days seemed all too short to hold her happiness.

As for James Carnegie of Finhaven, he was brought to trial on a charge
of murder, and every nerve was strained to bring him to the gallows.
That this was not his fate, in spite of the terrible provocation he had
received, and the obviously accidental nature of the tragedy, he owed
entirely to the skill and eloquence of his counsel, Robert Dundas of
Arniston, who played so cleverly on the feelings and self-importance of
the jury that they returned a verdict of acquittal.

The widowed Countess mourned her lord deeply and sincerely. More
beautiful than ever (she was barely twenty when this tragedy came to
cloud her life), and richly dowered, many a wooer sought to console her
with a new prospect of wedded happiness. She had naught to say to any of
them. She preferred to live alone with her memories, and to find solace
in good works. And thus for seventeen years she lived, a model of all
that is beautiful in womanhood, captivating all hearts by her sweetness
and graciousness, and by a beauty which sorrow only served to refine and
make more lovely still.

Thus we find her in 1745, a gracious and lovely woman, still young,
dispensing her charities and hospitalities, and esteemed everywhere as a
model of all the proprieties. But she was still a woman. Romance and
passion were by no means dead in her; and to this "eternal feminine" we
must look for an explanation of the strange event which now follows in
her story.

Among the Countess's many servants was one George Forbes, a young and
strikingly handsome groom, who had been taken on as stable-boy by her
late husband. Forbes was a simple, manly fellow, a peasant's son, and
with no ambition beyond the state of life to which he had been born. He
was proud of the fact that he had served his mistress well, and that she
liked him. That Lady Strathmore valued her groom was proved by the fact
that she chose him as her escort whenever she went riding, and that she
promoted him to the charge of her stables--a proof of confidence which
no doubt he had earned. But that his high-placed mistress should regard
him otherwise than as a servant was an absurd idea which never entered