n the background.

'Come, Madame!' called his Highness. Wilhelmine sprang into the chaise,
and Madame de Ruth, perilously balanced on the step, wrapped a white lace
mantilla round the bride. The horses bounded forward, and, urged by the
postillions, raced away at a hand gallop.

This was the first of that furious driving with which the favourite, in
after years, habitually dashed through the country. It was one of the
causes of her unpopularity with the peasants; they cursed her and her
wild horses. 'Why such haste to do the devil's work?' they muttered; and
they cursed the dust which the chariot left, as the hated Graevenitzin
thundered through the villages.

CHAPTER XII

THE MOCK COURT

'The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

_Hamlet._

AFTER their marriage his Highness and the Countess of Urach took up their
residence in the castle of Hohen-Tuebingen, where Wilhelmine had wandered,
a lonely stranger, on the morning of her arrival in Wirtemberg. Now she
was the queen of the grim fortress, and, looking upon the fair valley and
the distant hills, she would often ponder on the marvellous workings of
her destiny.

The court of Wirtemberg naturally held aloof from the unlawful
magnificence at Tuebingen, and her Ladyship of Urach realised that she
must form a circle of her own, so she summoned her family from the north.

Her sister, Emma Sittmann, came from Berlin accompanied by her husband,
the merchant's warehouse clerk, who it was said, had been at one time
hairdresser to a Countess of Wartensleben, and had been dismissed for his
insolence. A cousin came with the Sittmanns, Schuetz by name, a shady
attorney who had been discredited for sharp practices in various towns,
including Vienna, where, however, he still retained business relations of
a mysterious and probably reprehensible character. A number of friends
and relations, both of Schuetz's and Sittmann's, also hastened to
Tuebingen. Sittmann had been married once before he took Wilhelmine's
sister to wife, and of this former union he had two gawky sons, who
accompanied their father and stepmother to this land of promise.

Old Frau von Graevenitz was invited by her successful daughter to repair
to Wirtemberg but the harsh old lady responded by a bluff refusal and a
command to Wilhelmine to return to virtue. She never visited Wirtemberg,
and though she co