“Her levities,” says a chronicler of the time, “were very publicly talked of, and some gallantries were ascribed to her which were greatly believed.  However, they were never brought home to her; and, if she were guilty, she escaped with only a little private scandal, which generally falls to the lot of every woman of uncommon beauty who is envied by the rest of her sex.”

During the summer of 1760 the unhappy lady lay at the point of death, in her stately home at Croome Court, bravely awaiting the end.

“Until the last few days,” says Mr Horace Bleackley, “the pretty Countess lay upon a sofa, with a mirror in her hand, gazing with yearning eyes upon the reflection of her fading charms.  To the end her ruling passion was unchanged; for when she perceived that her beauty had vanished she asked to be carried to bed, and called for the room to be darkened and the curtains drawn, permitting none to look upon her pallid face and sunken cheeks.”

Thus, robbed of all that had made life worth living, and bitterly realising the vanity of beauty, Lady Coventry drew her last breath on October 1st 1760.  Ten days later, ten thousand persons paid their last homage to her in Pirton churchyard.

* * * * *

Three weeks before Maria Gunning blossomed into a Countess her younger sister Betty had been led to the altar under much more romantic conditions, after one of the most rapid and impetuous wooings in the annals of Love.  A few weeks before she wore her wedding-ring, the man who was to win her was not even known to her by sight; and what she had heard of him was by no means calculated to impress her in his favour.  The Duke of Hamilton, while still young, had won for himself a very unenviable notoriety as a debauchee in an age of profligacy.  He had drunk deep of every cup of questionable pleasure; and at an age when he should have been in the very prime of his manhood, he was a physical wreck, his vitality drained almost to its last drop by shameful excesses.

Such was the man who entered the lists against a legion of formidable rivals for the guerdon of Betty Gunning’s hand.  It was at a masquerade that he first seems to have set eyes on her; and at sight of her this jaded, worn devotee of pleasure fell headlong in love.  Within an hour of being introduced he was, Walpole says,

“making violent love to her at one end of the room, in my Lord Chesterfield’s house, while he was playing at pharaoh at the other; that is, he neither saw the bank nor his own cards, which were of L300 each.  He soon lost a thousand.”

Such was the first meeting of the lovely Irish girl, and the man whom she was to marry—­a man who, even in the thraldom of a violent love, could not refrain from indulging his passion for gambling.  So inflamed was he by this new beauty who had crossed his path that, to quote our entertaining gossip again,