but while, with tantalising coquetry, she kept them all dangling, one
alone tempted her--that which was laid at her feet by the Duke of
Hamilton, a gallant whose high rank was rivalled by his handsome face
and figure, and his many courtly accomplishments.

When the Duke asked her to be his wife she graciously consented, and her
Duchess's coronet seemed assured thus early, with a prospect of
happiness that does not always accompany it; for in this case she seems
to have given her heart where she gave her hand. For a time the course
of true love ran smoothly, and the maid-of-honour became a model of
decorum as the affianced wife of the man she loved.

But her dream of happiness was destined to be short-lived. An intriguing
aunt, Mrs Hanmer, who had no love for the Hamiltons, set to work to dash
the cup of happiness from her niece's lips. She intercepted the Duke's
letters, poured into Elizabeth's ears poisonous stories of his
infidelities and entanglements to account for his silence, and, when the
poison began to show signs of working, whisked her niece away on a visit
to the country-house of her cousin, Mr Merrill, at Lainston, where among
her fellow-guests was a dashing young naval lieutenant, the Hon.
Augustus Hervey, who was second heir to his father's Earldom of Bristol.

The lieutenant, as was inevitable, perhaps, fell promptly under the
spell of the maid-of-honour's charms, and made violent love to her,
with, of course, Mrs Hanmer's whole-hearted connivance. The girl,
blazing with resentment of the Duke's coldness, and his apparent
indifference to her beauty and his vows, lent a willing ear to his
pleadings, and within a few days had promised to be wife to a man whom,
as she confessed later, she "almost hated."