the Duke in an anxious tone; 'let me escort you
immediately to your coach.'

Wilhelmine bowed to the two Duchesses, but her salute remained
unacknowledged.

A petty social annoyance, a commonplace occurrence of disagreeable
import, a moment's pique, have often brought about historic changes, the
real cause whereof lies deep in the secret working of men's hearts and
can only be understood by each one to himself. Thus in Wirtemberg's
eighteenth-century record, the homely, unpleasant, trifling scene on
Christmas Eve wrought a change in the history, destined to influence the
affairs of the country for many years.

The Graevenitz returned to the Jaegerhaus profoundly humiliated, deeply
wounded. The Duchess-mother's remarks had been embarrassing and painful;
each word as a finger of scorn pointed at that disgraceful bargain with
Wuerben, at the recollection whereof Wilhelmine winced. But when Johanna
Elizabetha snatched the Erbprinz away from her as though her very touch
was contamination for the child, her whole being had shuddered with the
ignominy. She knew herself to be accounted vile, one of the outcasts from
whose proximity every virtuous woman must shrink and instinctively seek
to protect all she loves, all she esteems pure. There is a terrible
anguish to the outcast woman in this withdrawal from her of a child.
Suddenly, she learns to measure her shame with a new gauge: by the lofty
instinct of a mother's reverence for her child's fair innocence. Then the
pariah realises that she is thrust beyond the pale of human purity. She
has chosen the black mud of vice as her portion, and her presence reeks;
she is tainted, and may not approach the pure.

If in the stillness of that Christmas night Wilhelmine, realising this,
agonised, as countless women have realised and suffered, the next morning
she showed no sign of the night's anguish. Unless her mood of unrelenting
decision was the outcome thereof.

She had decided to present to Eberhard Ludwig two alternatives: either
Johanna Elizabetha must retire to a dower-house, leaving the favourite
mistress of Stuttgart, or the court of Wirtemberg must follow their Duke
and the Landhofmeisterin to Tuebingen, Urach, or wherever it suited her to
direct, leaving the Duchess in a mournful, deserted Stuttgart.

In any case, it must be provided that no possibility should exist of an
humiliation such as she had suffered on the preceding evening. And as she
intended to remain at the h