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 his head.

One day, however, the Countess summoned the groom to her presence, and, to his amazement and embarrassment, told him that she had long grown to love him, and that she asked nothing better of life than to become his wife.  Overcome with surprise and confusion, Forbes protested—­“But my lady, think of the difference between us.  You are one of the greatest ladies in the land, and I am no better than the earth you tread on.”  “You must not say that,” the Countess replied.  “You are more to me than rank or riches.  These I count as nothing, compared with the happiness you have it in your power to bestow.”

In the face of such pleading, from one so beautiful and so reverenced, what could the poor groom do but consent, fearful though he was of the consequences of such an ill-assorted union?  And thus strangely and romantically it was that, one April day in 1745, the Countess of Strathmore, the descendant of dukes and kings, gave her hand at the altar to the ex-stable-lad and peasant’s son.

What followed this singular union was precisely what was to be expected.  The Countess was disowned by her noble relatives; her friends with one consent gave her the cold shoulder; and, unable to bear any longer the constant slights and her complete isolation, she was thankful to escape with her low-born husband to the Continent.