Here familiarity with the groom quickly, and naturally, perhaps, bred contempt and disillusion.  His coarseness offended every susceptibility; he was frankly impossible in such an intimate relation; and after she had given birth to a daughter in Holland, she arranged a separation, for which the groom was, at least, as grateful as herself.  The child—­the very sight of whom, reminding her as she did of the father, she could not bear—­was placed in a convent at Rouen, where she was tenderly cared for by the abbess and nuns.  As for the mother, weary and disillusioned, she rambled aimlessly and miserably about the Continent until, after nine years of unhappiness, death came to her at Paris as a merciful friend.  Such was the sordid close of a life that had opened as fairly as any that has fallen to the lot of woman.

And what of the child who drew from her mother royal and ducal strains, and from her father the blood of stablemen and peasants?  At the Rouen convent she grew up to girlhood, perfectly happy, among the nuns she learned to love.  The sad and beautiful lady who had come once or twice to see her, and who, she was told, was her mother, had become a dim memory of early girlhood.  Who the great lady was, and who was her father, she did not know.  This knowledge the nuns, in their wisdom, kept from her—­if, indeed, they knew themselves.

One day, in 1761, her days of childish happiness came to an abrupt and sensational end.  A rough seafaring man called at the convent with a letter from her father demanding the return of his daughter.  The bearer was sent by the captain of a merchant-vessel, who had instructions to convey the girl from Rouen to Leith; and, after an affecting farewell to the abbess and nuns, who had been so kind to her, Susan Janet Emilia (for that was the girl’s name) started with her strange escort on the long journey to a parent whom she had never consciously seen.  The father, released by the death of the Countess, had married a second wife of his own station, and had settled as a livery-stable keeper at Leith, where, with his rapidly-growing family, he had now made his home for some years.

At last Emilia was handed over to the custody of her groom-father, who conducted her to his home, which, as may be imagined, was a pitiful and sordid exchange for the peace and happiness of her convent life.  From the first day the new life was impossible.  Emilia was treated by her stepmother with coarseness and brutality; she was daily taunted with her dependent position, and shown in a hundred ways that her presence was unwelcome.

Can one wonder that the proud spirit of the girl rebelled against such ignominy?  It was better far to trust to the mercy of the world than to bear the brutal treatment of her low-born stepmother.  And thus it came to pass that, early one morning, before the household was awake, Emilia slipped stealthily away with a few shillings, all her worldly possessions, in her pocket.  Walking a few miles along the shore, she took the packet-boat, and crossed to the Fife coast, thus placing a broad arm of the sea between herself and the house of misery and oppression she had left for ever.