For three years the banker kept his vow that he would never forgive her and her shameless husband.  The Earl, indeed, he never did forgive, but his daughter won her way back into his heart, and to her he left the whole of his colossal fortune, amounting, it is said, to little less than L100,000 a year.

It was from this romantic union that the Lady Sarah Sophia Fane came, who was to unite the ’prentice strain of Francis Child with the blood of the proud Villiers.  As a young girl the Lady Sarah needed no such rich dower as was hers to commend her to the eyes of wooers.  From the Fanes she inherited a full share of the beauty for which their women were noted, and to it she added many charms of her own.  She had a figure, tall, commanding, and of exquisite grace, eyes blue as violets, a luxuriant crown of dark hair, and a complexion pure and beautiful as a lily.

It is little wonder that a young lady so dowered with gold and good looks should attract lovers by the score, all anxious to win so fair a prize.  But to one only of them all would she listen, Lord Villiers, heir to the Earldom of Jersey, a man of towering stature and handsome face, aristocrat and courtier to his finger-tips, a fearless and graceful rider, and an expert in manly sports.  Such a combination of attractions the daughter of Anne Child could not long, nor was she at all disposed to, resist.  And one May day in 1804—­almost twenty-two years to the day after her parents’ dramatic flight to Gretna Green—­the Lady Sarah became Vicountess Villiers.  A year later she was Countess of Jersey.

From her first entry into society the child-countess (for she was little more than a child) took the position of a Queen, to which her rank, wealth, and beauty entitled her, and which she held, supreme and unassailable, as long as life lasted.  Her salon was a second Royal Court to which flocked all the greatest in the land, proud to pay homage to the “Empress of Fashion.”  She entertained kings with a regal splendour.  Their Majesties of Prussia and Belgium, Holland and Hanover, and the Tsar Nicholas I. were all delighted to do honour to a hostess so captivating and so queenly.

At Middleton Park, her lord’s Oxfordshire seat, she dispensed a hospitality which was the despair of her rivals.  Her retinue of servants seldom numbered less than a hundred, and many a week her guests, with their attendants, far exceeded a thousand.  Money was squandered with a prodigal hand.  The very servants, it is said, drank champagne and hock like water; her housemaids had their riding horses, and dressed in silks and satins.  Among her thousands of guests were such men as Wellington and Peel, Castlereagh and Canning, all humble worshippers at her shrine; and Lord Byron who, in his gloomy moods, would shut himself in his bedroom for days, living on biscuits and water, and stealing out at dead of night to wander ghost-like through the neighbouring woods.  These moods of black despondency he varied by turbulent spirits, when he would be the gayest of the gay, and would challenge his fellow-guests to drinking bouts, in which he always came off the victor.