It was an ideal union, this of the beautiful Lady Susanna with the stalwart and handsome young Earl—­“the fairest lass and bonniest lad” in all Scotland; and none who saw their radiant happiness on their wedding-day could have dreamt how soon tragedy was to close so bright a chapter of romance.

For a few short years the young Earl and his Countess were ideally happy.

     “I never thought,” Lady Strathmore wrote to a friend,
     “that life could be so sweet.  The days are all too short
     to crowd my happiness into.”

Then, when the sky was fairest, the blow fell.

One May day in the year 1728, the young Earl went to Forfar to attend the funeral of a friend, and among his fellow-mourners were two men of his acquaintance, James Carnegie, of Finhaven, and a Mr Lyon, of Brigton, the latter a distant relative of the Earl.

After the funeral the three men sat drinking together, as was the custom of the time, and then adjourned to a tavern in Forfar, where they continued their potations until all three were, beyond all doubt, in an advanced state of intoxication, and ripe for any mischief.

From the tavern they went, uproariously drunk, to call on a sister of Carnegie, where Mr Lyon not only became quarrelsome, but with drunken jocularity, had the audacity to pinch his hostess’s arms.  It was with the utmost difficulty that Lord Strathmore induced his two companions to leave the house, in which one of them had so far forgotten what was due from him as a gentleman; and it was scarcely to be wondered at that an unseemly brawl began almost as soon as they were in the street.

Mr Lyon began to conduct himself more outrageously than before, now that the modified restraint of a lady’s presence was removed.  With boisterous horseplay, he pushed Carnegie into a deep gutter which ran by the roadside, and from which Carnegie emerged covered with mud and raging with fury.  Such an insult could only be wiped out with blood; and, drawing his sword, Carnegie rushed at his tormentor.  The Earl, in order to avert a tragedy, imprudently threw himself between the two antagonists, with the intention of diverting the blow.  Carnegie’s sword entered his body, passing clean through it; and he fell to the ground a dying man.  Two hours 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.