Hence art of every kind appeared to her to
be no more than a means of acquiring the object most valuable to her in
life. Education had not given her any principle by which she might
have checked the headlong impulse of her now aroused passions. Brought
up as a worshiped object, in the little court of her parents, at
Kirkwall, in the Orkneys, her father the Earl of Strathern, in
Scotland, and her mother being a princess of Norway, whose dowry
brought him the sovereignty of those isles, their daughter never knew
any law but her own will, from her doting mother. And on the fearful
loss of that mother, in a marine excursion of pleasure, by an accident
oversetting the boat she was in, the bereaved daughter fell into such a
despair, on her first pang of grief of any kind, that her similarly
distracted father (whose little dominions happened then to be menaced
by a descent of the Danes) sought a safe and cheering home for his only
child, at the interesting age of seventeen, by sending her over sea, to
the protecting care of his long-affianced friend, the Earl of Mar, and
to his lovely countess, then an only three years' wife with one infant
daughter.
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