"Many a gallant gay domestic Bow before him at the door; And they speak in gentle murmur When they answer to his call, While he treads with footsteps firmer Leading on from hall to hall. And while now she wanders blindly, Nor the meaning can divine, Proudly turns he round and kindly, 'All of that is mine and thine.'" Thus did Sarah Hoggins, the peasant-girl, blossom into a Countess, chatelaine of three lordly pleasure-houses, and Lady Bountiful to an army of dependents. The news of the romantic story flashed through the county, indeed through the whole of England; and great lords and ladies by the score flocked to Burleigh to welcome and pay homage to its heroine. For a few too brief years Countess Sarah was happy in her new and splendid environment, though it is said she often sighed for the dear dead days when her husband was a landscape painter, and she his humble bride in their village home. The modest primrose did not bear well the transplanting to the lordly hot-house. Her cheeks began to lose their roses. She bore to her husband three children; and then, "like a lily drooping, she bowed down her head and died," tenderly and lovingly nursed to the last breath by the husband whose heart, it is said, died with her. Of her two sons, the elder succeeded to his father's Earldom, and was promoted to a Marquisate. The younger, Lord Thomas Cecil, married a daughter of the fourth Duke of Richmond--thus mingling the peasant blood of Hoggins with the Royal strain of the "Merrie Monarch,"--and survived until the year 1873. Her daughter had for husband the Right Honourable Henry Manvers Pierrepoint, and became grandmother to the present Duke of Wellington, who thus has for great-grandmother Sarah Hoggins, the rustic beauty who milked cows and was wooed in the Shropshire orchard by "Mr Jones, the highwayman," when George the Third was King. CHAPTER XXI THE FAVOURITE OF A QUEEN When Robert Dudley was cradled in the year 1532 the ball of Fortune was already at his feet, awaiting the necessary vigour and enterprise to kick it. He had, it is true, no great lineage to boast of. Cecil spoke contemptuously of him in later and envious years as grandson of a mere squire and son of a knight; but the so-called squire was none other than Edmond Dudley, the shrewd financier and crafty-tongued minion of Henry VII., who, with Empson for ally, filled his sovereign's purse with ill-gotten gold, and paid for his enterprise with his head when the eighth Henry set himself to the paying off of old scores. His father, the knight, was that John Dudley, King Henry's trusted friend and executor of his will, Admiral and Earl Marshal of England, whose splendid gifts and boundless ambition won a dukedom for him, and made him for a time more powerful than his King. [Illustration: ROBERT DUDLEY, EARL OF LEICESTER]