Was ever wooing and winning so strange, so inexplicable? After refusing some of the greatest alliances in the land, after turning her back on at least half-a-dozen coronets, this wilful and wayward woman gives her hand to the least desirable of all her legion of suitors--a man broken in fortune and of notorious ill-fame: swashbuckler, gambler and defaulter; a man, moreover, who was on the verge of old-age, for he would never see his sixtieth birthday again. The Colonel's motive is manifest. He had much to gain and nothing to lose by this incongruous union. But what could have been Lady Jean's motive; and does the sequel furnish a clue to it? She was deeply in debt, thanks to her long career of extravagance; and, to crown her misfortune, her brother threatened to withdraw her annuity. But on the other hand she was still, although nearly fifty, a good-looking woman, "appearing," we are told, "at least fifteen years younger than she really was"; and thus might well have looked for a eligible suitor; while her marriage to a pauper could but add to her financial embarrassment. There remained the prospect of her brother's estates, which would almost surely fall to her children if she had any, if only to keep them out of the hands of the Hamiltons, whom the Duke detested. And this consideration may have determined her in favour of this eleventh hour marriage, with its possibilities, however small, of thus qualifying for a great inheritance. Thus it was, whatever may be the solution of the mystery, that, one August day in 1746, Lady Jean was led to the altar by her aged pauper lover, and a few days later the happy pair landed at Rotterdam, with a retinue consisting of a Mrs Hewit (Lady Jean's maid) and a couple of female servants, leaving her ladyship's creditors to wrangle over the belongings she had left behind at Edinburgh. From Rheims, to which town the wedding party journeyed, Lady Jean wrote to her man of business, Mr Haldane:-- "It is mighty certain that my anticipations were never in the marrying way; and had I not at last been absolutely certain that my brother was resolved never to marry, I never should have once thought of doing it; but since this was his determined, unalterable resolution, I judged it fit to overcome a natural disinclination and backwardness, and to put myself in the way of doing something for a family not the worst in Scotland; and, therefore, gave my hand to Mr Stewart, the consequence of which has proved more happy than I could well have expected." Such was the unenthusiastic letter Lady Jean wrote on her honeymoon, assigning as her motive for the marriage a wish "to do something for her family," which could scarcely be other than to provide heirs to the Douglas lands--an ambition which to the most sanguine lady of her age must have seemed sufficiently doubtful of realisation.