Secret orders were given that the young people were never to be allowed to be together. The Princess, indeed, carried her interference to the extent of breaking in on their conferences, and rudely laughing in Lady Sarah's face as she led her son away. "I felt many a time," the insulted girl said in later years, "that I should have loved to box her ears." But Lady Sarah, who seems at last to have awakened to the attractions of the alliance offered to her, was not the girl to sit down tamely under such interference with her liberty. Her spirit was aroused, and she brought all her arts of coquetry to her aid. If she could not see the King at Court she would see him elsewhere. When George took his daily ride he was sure to meet or overtake Lady Sarah, attired in some bewitching costume; or to see her daintily plying her rake among the haymakers in the meadows of Holland House, a picture of rustic beauty well-calculated to make his conquest more complete. Once, it is said, when she had not seen her Royal lover for some days she even disguised herself as a servant and intercepted him in one of the corridors of the Palace. The coy and cold maiden who had told the King that she "thought nothing" of his advances, had developed into the veriest coquette who ever set her heart on winning a man. Such is the strange waywardness of woman; and by such revolutions she often courts her own defeat. That King George still remained as infatuated as ever is quite probable. Had it been possible for him to have his own way, Lady Sarah Lennox might still have won a crown as Queen of England. But the forces arrayed against him were too strong for so pliant a monarch. In a weak moment, despairing of winning the girl he loved, he had placed his matrimonial fate unreservedly in the hands of the Privy Council; and from this surrender of his liberty there was no escape. Colonel Graeme had been despatched to every Court on the Continent, in quest of a suitable bride for him; and his verdict had been given in favour of Charlotte Sophia, the unattractive daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg Strelitz. The die was cast; and George, just when happiness was within his reach, was obliged to bury the one romance of his young life and to sacrifice himself to duty and his Royal word. To Lady Sarah the news of the arranged marriage was no doubt a severe blow--to her vanity, if not to her heart. It was a "bolt from the blue," for which she was not prepared. But she was too proud to show her wounds.