Once, it is said, when she had not seen her Royal lover for some days she even disguised herself as a servant and intercepted him in one of the corridors of the Palace.  The coy and cold maiden who had told the King that she “thought nothing” of his advances, had developed into the veriest coquette who ever set her heart on winning a man.  Such is the strange waywardness of woman; and by such revolutions she often courts her own defeat.

That King George still remained as infatuated as ever is quite probable.  Had it been possible for him to have his own way, Lady Sarah Lennox might still have won a crown as Queen of England.  But the forces arrayed against him were too strong for so pliant a monarch.  In a weak moment, despairing of winning the girl he loved, he had placed his matrimonial fate unreservedly in the hands of the Privy Council; and from this surrender of his liberty there was no escape.

Colonel Graeme had been despatched to every Court on the Continent, in quest of a suitable bride for him; and his verdict had been given in favour of Charlotte Sophia, the unattractive daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg Strelitz.  The die was cast; and George, just when happiness was within his reach, was obliged to bury the one romance of his young life and to sacrifice himself to duty and his Royal word.  To Lady Sarah the news of the arranged marriage was no doubt a severe blow—­to her vanity, if not to her heart.  It was a “bolt from the blue,” for which she was not prepared.  But she was too proud to show her wounds.

“I shall take care,” she wrote to her friend, Lady Susan, on the very day on which the blow fell, “I shall take care to show that I am not mortified to anybody; but if it is true that one can vex anybody with a reserved, cold manner, he shall have it, I promise him.  Now as to what I wish about it myself, excepting this little message, I have almost forgiven him.  Luckily for me I did not love him, and only liked, nor did the title weigh with me.  So little, at least, that my disappointment did not affect my spirits more than an hour or two, I believe.  I did not cry, I assure you, which I believe you will, as I know you were more set on it than I was.  The thing I am most angry at is looking so like a fool, as I shall, for having gone so often for nothing, but I don’t much care.  If he was to change his mind again (which can’t be, tho’) and not give me a very good reason for his conduct, I would not have him; for if he is so weak as to be governed by everybody, I shall have but a bad time of it.”

A few days later, the Royal betrothal was made public.  At the wedding Lady Sarah tasted the first fruits of revenge, when she was by common consent, the most lovely of the ten beautiful bridesmaids who, in robes of white velvet and silver and with diamond-crowned heads, formed the retinue of George’s homely little bride.  During the ceremony George had no eyes for any but the vision of peerless beauty he had lost, who, compared with his ill-favoured bride, was “as a queenly lily to a dandelion.”