ides, it was as
much as the marriage-portion of six princesses of Wirtemberg.

The Duke was approached. He retorted that the Countess of Graevenitz was
perfectly justified in any demand she chose to make. The Duchess-mother
arrived, and spoke, as usual, plainly to her son; but he had not
forgotten how his mother had dragged him, like a repentant school-child,
from Urach to be reconciled to Johanna Elizabetha. He owed the
Duchess-mother a grudge, and paid it by remaining firm concerning the
justice of Wilhelmine's claim.

The Privy Council offered her twenty thousand gulden. Then forty
thousand. Both sums were refused. 'Two hundred thousand or nothing,' she
answered. So the negotiations were broken off.

Meanwhile, had the Geheimraethe but known it, the 'Revers' had long been
signed, sealed, and despatched to Vienna.

Wilhelmine again sent Schuetz to Stuttgart with the message that, as she
had not been given just and fair compensation, she would know how, at a
future date, to wring out from Wirtemberg a hundred times the modest sum
refused her.

The Geheimraethe, thinking their foe vanquished and the affair at an end,
laughed at this threat. They would have trembled had they known that the
Graevenitz had a plan, and that their Duke was cognisant of the whole
matter.

* * * * *

Wilhelmine, gazing at the waters of the Rhine with her half-closed,
serpent-like eyes, sought for some device which should enable her to
return to Stuttgart. In the first place, she loved power; in the second,
she loved Eberhard Ludwig; in the third, she yearned to outwit her enemy
Johanna Elizabetha and her opposers generally. Then she longed once more
to defy the Duchess-mother, whom she, at the same time, greatly dreaded.

By this you will see that Wilhelmine was no longer merely the gay,
charming, if scheming woman who had come to Wirtemberg sixteen months
before. She had developed. Her extraordinary prosperity had poisoned her
being. She had grown hard. Could she not achieve the height of power by
one road, very well, she was ready to climb back by any circuitous path
she could find. For many days her ingenuity and her searchings failed to
show her any way back to Stuttgart. It was the pretext for returning
which she sought; once there she knew she could grasp power again, and
this time she intended to retain it. A chance speech of Madame de Ruth's
set her on the track.

'Ah! my dear, we have gone too