etten, descended
periodically upon Stuttgart, rated her son, condoled with Johanna
Elizabetha, and returned utterly unsuccessful to Stetten.

Forstner's warning voice was never silent. Osiander failed to return
Wilhelmine's salutation when she encountered him in the Lustgarten. It
was open war between virtue and the Graevenitz.

Stuttgart in the winter is a vastly different place to the smiling, gay
Stuttgart of spring and summer days, and Wilhelmine often wondered
whither had vanished the charm, the delight of Southern Germany. That
winter there fell but little snow, a cruel black frost was over the whole
valley; sometimes the frost relaxed his iron grip, and then came torrents
of rain. The frost returned when the rain ceased, and taking the wet
earth into his gaunt hands turned everything into dirty sheet ice. In
Wilhelmine's yellow room at the Jaegerhaus the blue stove radiated a
pleasant warmth, and, if a feeble sunray struggled through the gloomy,
leaden sky, the yellow hangings caught it like a lover, and seemed to
treasure it, filling the whole room with a hint of spring sunshine. In
the castle the Duchess sat in her sombre apartments which she had made as
dull, as dreary, as charmless as herself. Eberhard Ludwig seldom visited
her, and she spent her time in cosseting the sickly Erbprinz, or
bemoaning her fate to Madame de Stafforth.

Slowly the winter left the land, but the spring that year was a meagre
starveling, niggardly of smiles. He seemed to have borrowed winter's
breath, and the pale young leaves shuddered in the unfriendly blasts. The
fruit blossom struggled into a nipped existence, and fell like thin snow
to the ground. An eerie spring, and men said there was a spell upon the
country, and looked towards the Jaegerhaus as they spoke.

During the winter the French army under Marechal Villars had again
threatened Wirtemberg. On a cheerless day towards the end of April
Eberhard Ludwig arrived as usual in the early morning to visit his
beloved at the Jaegerhaus. For several days she had noticed a cloud upon
his brow, he had answered her absently, and she knew instinctively that
there was something on his mind, which he desired to tell her. Too wise
to question him, she watched him closely. When he entered the yellow-hung
salon that cheerless April morning, he greeted her almost coldly, and
began to play roughly with his huge black wolf-hound, Melac. This animal
was the Duke's constant companion--an extra