egal reports of the learned doctors-at-law engaged upon
her matrimonial business. Johanna Elizabetha welcomed the twilight hour's
solitary musing. Poor soul! often she spent this hour on her knees,
mourning her sorrow before God.

One evening towards the middle of April, the Duchess had withdrawn as
usual to her own apartments leaving Madame de Stafforth in the chief
salon reading a sermon by an eminent Swiss divine. The two ladies had
felt strangely nervous and anxious during the afternoon, and several
times it had seemed to her Highness that she heard stealthy footsteps on
the inner gallery of the courtyard, but when she questioned the
page-in-waiting whose duty it was to watch at the door of the ante-hall
leading to her Highness's rooms, the youth replied that he had seen and
heard nothing. The Duchess told herself she was becoming a fearsome,
anxious old woman, and she endeavoured to smile down the haunting feeling
of some unseen, creeping presence. Still it was with a sense of
trepidation that she entered the small room where she was wont to
meditate each evening when the day's wearisome, self-imposed labours were
ended. This room lay beyond her Highness's sleeping chamber and had a
small balcony looking over the Lustgarten.

This apartment was plainly furnished, almost monastic in its simplicity:
one chair, a small bureau, a table on which lay a few books of sermons
and volumes of theological treatises, and a praying-stool stood against
the wall. The only thing recalling the vanities of the world was a mirror
let into the panel above the praying-stool. Indeed, this mirror was a
relic of one of poor Johanna Elizabetha's few happy hours. Eberhard
Ludwig had ordered the whole room to be panelled with mirrors, having
seen some such conceit in a chateau in France during his travels. He had
thought to please her Highness by this attention, but the dull, awkward
woman had forbidden the completion of the plan: it was a wrongful waste
of money, she averred, and a French vanity! So Eberhard Ludwig had
angrily commanded the workmen to desist, and, wounded and offended, he
had reflected on his wife's lack of appreciation of the little elegancies
of life. True, she had seemed pleased by his thought of her, she had
thanked him--but she had declined his present!

The only alteration in the castle which Johanna Elizabetha had ever been
known to order had been done, to the surprise of all, some time after the
Duke's desertion of