At last there comes a duke,--fifty years old, indeed, but with semi-royal appanages.

As his wife she will become a duchess, with many diamonds, and be her Excellency.

The man is stern, cold, and jealous; but she does not doubt for a moment.

She is to be Duchess of Hamilton, and towers already in pride of place above her mother, and her kinsman lover, and all her belongings.

The story here, with its little incidents of birth, and blood, and ignoble pride, and gratified ambition, with a dash of true feminine nobility on the part of the girl's mother, is such as to leave one with the impression that it has hardly been beaten in English prose fiction.