"the poor Duke," to quote Woodrow, "who for many years had been crazed in his brain, told this familiar, who persuaded him that such an insult could only be wiped out in blood. On which the Duke proceeded to Ker's room and stabbed him as he was sleeping." It is little wonder that Lady Jean declined to live with a brother who was thus a slave to his own servants and to a temper so insane; but although their lives were led apart, and although, among many other mad delusions, the Duke was convinced that his sister had applied for a warrant to "confine him as a madman and she to sit down on the estate and take possession of it," he was generous enough to make her a liberal allowance, and to promise that, if she married and had children, "they would heir his estate." Such was the state of affairs at the time this story really opens. Lady Jean had carried her aversion to men and matrimony to middle-age, happy enough in her independence and extravagance; while the Duke, still unwed, remained a prey to his jealousies, his morbid fancies and his insensate rages; and it is at this time that Colonel Stewart, the "villain of the play," makes his appearance on the stage. Ten years earlier, it is true, John Stewart, of Grandtully, had tried to repair his shattered fortunes by making love to Lady Jean, who, although then a woman of nearly forty, was still handsome enough, as he confessed later, to "captivate my heart at the first sight of her." She was, moreover (and this was much more to the point), a considerable heiress, with the vast Douglas estates as good as assured to her. But to the handsome adventurer Lady Jean turned a deaf ear, as to all her other suitors; and the "Colonel," who had never won any army rank higher than that of a subaltern, had to return ignominiously to the Continent, where for another ten years he picked up a precarious living at the gaming-tables, by borrowing or by any other low expedient that opportunity provided to his scheming brain. The Duke of Douglas, who cordially detested this down-at-heels cousin, called him "one of the worst of men--a papist, a Jacobite, a gamester, a villain"--and his career certainly seems to justify this sweeping and scathing description. Such was the man who now reappeared to put his fate again to the test--and this time with such success that, to quote his own words, "very soon after I had an obliging message from Lady Jean telling me that, very soon after my leaving Scotland, she came to know she had done me an injustice, but she would acknowledge it publicly if I chose. _Enfin_, I was allowed to visit her as formerly, and in about three months after she honoured me with her hand."