ng-room. She
would not allow her eyes to wander to the bed-hangings, nor to search the
dusky corners of the chamber. She passed on, and, gaining the little
study, laid the book open on the table, and, leaning her head on her
hands, began to read; but she could not fix her attention on the page
before her. She was tortured by faint stirrings, by scarcely perceptible
sounds, by an eerie feeling of some lurking presence always behind her.

At length she could bear it no longer. She closed the book and rose,
intending to ring the hand-bell and summon her attendants, but the words
of the sermon echoed in her brain: 'It is blasphemy to fear,' and she
felt ashamed of her impulse. She turned, and, going to the praying-stool,
kneeled in prayer.

'Give me strength, O God! to resist this baseless terror,' she prayed.
'In thy hands are all things!' Yet her anxiety was unsoothed, and the
dread of madness came to her, but with it grew a brave defiance: she
would not go mad, she would not! She saw herself a prisoner in some
castle, kept alive and well treated, perhaps, but a piteous object, a
thing for all to point at--'the mad Duchess!' And the Graevenitz at
Stuttgart a legal Duchess. She believed a Prince could put away an insane
wife. 'Not madness, kind Jesus!' she prayed. Her heart was wrung in agony
as she pictured her son, the Erbprinz, taunted perhaps by the mention of
his mother's madness. 'All is in the Great Grasp, and each happening is
made and directed by God.' 'O Christ,' she prayed, 'I believe, I trust, I
will not blaspheme by fear; no madness can strike me down while I believe
and pray.' She lifted her hot face from her hands, calmed, soothed, brave
once more. She was rising from her knees, and the movement brought her
eyes on a level with the mirror panel. As one turned to stone, she stood
looking into the mirror, for it reflected one corner of her bed in the
next room, and the fading light fell on something white which pushed
aside the black brocade bed-curtain--a large yellow-white hand holding a
small gleaming knife. The Duchess, still with the dread of insanity upon
her, told herself that it was an hallucination, a delusion, the frenzied
working of her overwrought brain. She gathered her courage and fixed her
eyes on the mirror, which showed her what she conceived to be a phantom.
The hand was large, with hair growing hideously over it, and jagged,
bitten nails--she could see this distinctly, for the light fell fro