Such was the state of affairs at the time this story really opens.  Lady Jean had carried her aversion to men and matrimony to middle-age, happy enough in her independence and extravagance; while the Duke, still unwed, remained a prey to his jealousies, his morbid fancies and his insensate rages; and it is at this time that Colonel Stewart, the “villain of the play,” makes his appearance on the stage.

Ten years earlier, it is true, John Stewart, of Grandtully, had tried to repair his shattered fortunes by making love to Lady Jean, who, although then a woman of nearly forty, was still handsome enough, as he confessed later, to “captivate my heart at the first sight of her.”  She was, moreover (and this was much more to the point), a considerable heiress, with the vast Douglas estates as good as assured to her.  But to the handsome adventurer Lady Jean turned a deaf ear, as to all her other suitors; and the “Colonel,” who had never won any army rank higher than that of a subaltern, had to return ignominiously to the Continent, where for another ten years he picked up a precarious living at the gaming-tables, by borrowing or by any other low expedient that opportunity provided to his scheming brain.  The Duke of Douglas, who cordially detested this down-at-heels cousin, called him “one of the worst of men—­a papist, a Jacobite, a gamester, a villain”—­and his career certainly seems to justify this sweeping and scathing description.

Such was the man who now reappeared to put his fate again to the test—­and this time with such success that, to quote his own words,

“very soon after I had an obliging message from Lady Jean telling me that, very soon after my leaving Scotland, she came to know she had done me an injustice, but she would acknowledge it publicly if I chose. Enfin, I was allowed to visit her as formerly, and in about three months after she honoured me with her hand.”

Was ever wooing and winning so strange, so inexplicable?  After refusing some of the greatest alliances in the land, after turning her back on at least half-a-dozen coronets, this wilful and wayward woman gives her hand to the least desirable of all her legion of suitors—­a man broken in fortune and of notorious ill-fame:  swashbuckler, gambler and defaulter; a man, moreover, who was on the verge of old-age, for he would never see his sixtieth birthday again.  The Colonel’s motive is manifest.  He had much to gain and nothing to lose by this incongruous union.  But what could have been Lady Jean’s motive; and does the sequel furnish a clue to it?  She was deeply in debt, thanks to her long career of extravagance; and, to crown her misfortune, her brother threatened to withdraw her annuity.  But on the other hand she was still, although nearly fifty, a good-looking woman, “appearing,” we are told, “at least fifteen years younger than she really was”; and thus might well have looked for a eligible suitor; while her marriage to a pauper could but add to her financial embarrassment.  There remained the prospect of her brother’s estates, which would almost surely fall to her children if she had any, if only to keep them out of the hands of the Hamiltons, whom the Duke detested.  And this consideration may have determined her in favour of this eleventh hour marriage, with its possibilities, however small, of thus qualifying for a great inheritance.