the most tragic stories of the British Peerage. When her Duchess-sister
died she drifted into low companionships, was imprisoned for debt, and
actually bribed a hairdresser to marry her, in order to recover her
liberty. On the Continent, to which she escaped, she fell to still lower
depths--was arrested for pocket-picking, and for a time cleaned the
streets of Augsburg chained to a wheelbarrow, until a dose of poison set
her free from her fetters.




CHAPTER VIII

THE GORGEOUS COUNTESS


If, a century ago, Edmund Power, of Knockbrit, in County Tipperary, had
been told that his second daughter, Marguerite, would one day blossom
into a Countess, and live in history as one of the "most gorgeous"
figures in the fashionable world of London under three kings, he would
certainly have considered his prophetic informant an escaped lunatic,
and would probably have told him so, with the brutal frankness which was
one of his most amiable characteristics.

The Irish squire was a proud man--proud of his pretty and shiftless
wife, with her eternal talk of her Desmond ancestors; proud of two of
his three daughters, whose budding beauty was to win for them titled
husbands--one an English Viscount, the other a Comte de St Marsante; and
proudest of all of his own handsome figure and his local dignities. But
he was frankly ashamed to own himself father of his second daughter,