“I can assure your Grace,” his lordship writes, “she does great honour to the family wherever she appears, and is respected and beloved by all that have the honour of her acquaintance.  She certainly merits all the affectionate marks of an only brother to an only sister.”

This appeal, eloquent as it was, only seemed to fan the anger of the Duke, who, as he read it, declared to the Parish minister who was present:  “Why, the woman is mad....  I once thought, if there was a virtuous woman in the world, my sister Jeanie was one; but now I am going to say a thing that I should not say of my own sister—­I believe she is no better than ...; and that I believe there is not a virtuous woman in the world.”

At the very time—­so inconsistent was this singular woman—­that Lord Crawford, at her request, was breaking the news of her marriage to her brother, she was repudiating it indignantly to every person she met.  To Lady Wigton, she declared with tears that it was an “infamous story raised by Miss Molly Kerr, her cousin, in order to prejudice her brother against her, and that it had been so effectual that he had stopped her pension”; and she begged Lady Wigton “when she went to England to contradict it.”

But this nomadic, hand-to-mouth life could not go on indefinitely.  The supply of dupes began to show signs of failing, and in her extremity she wrote urgent letters to friends in England and Scotland for supplies; she even borrowed from a poor Scottish minister almost the last penny he had.  A crisis was rapidly approaching which there was no way of escaping—­unless the birth of a child might soften her brother’s heart, and, perchance, re-open the vista of a great inheritance in the years to come.  Such speculations must have occurred to Lady Jean at this critical stage of her fortunes; but whether what quickly followed was a coincidence, or, as so many asserted, a fraudulent plot to give effect to her ambition, it would need a much cleverer and more confident man than I to say.  At any rate, from this failure of her purse and of her hopes of propitiating the Duke began all those mysterious suggestions and circumstances, of which so much was made in the trial of future years, and which heralded the birth of the desired heir—­or “to make assurance doubly sure,” in Lady Jean’s case—­heirs.

As the expected event drew near it became important to go to Paris in order to have the advantage of the best medical assistance, especially since Lady Jean was assured that the doctors of Rheims, where she was then living, were “as ignorant as brutes.”  And so to the French capital she journeyed with her retinue, through three sultry July days, in a public diligence devoid of springs.  How trying such a journey must have been to a lady in her condition is evidenced by the fact that, during the three days, she spent forty-one hours on the road, reaching Paris on the 4th of July.  Just six days later her ladyship, to quote a letter written by Mrs Hewit, “produced two lovely boys,” one of whom was so weak and puny that the doctor “begged it might be sent to the country as soon as possible.”