th the letter which the Duke had refused to communicate
to her. She replaced her mask and returned to the ballroom. Still the
same monotonous whirling crowd, the pattering feet of the dancers, the
din of the music.

She searched for Serenissimus. He was standing with a group of masks at
the lower end of the hall, and did not observe her. She made her way
slowly through the crowd to the other side of the room, and slipped
through the door into the ante-hall. Immediately two lackeys sprang
forward to inquire her Excellency's pleasure. She waved them away and
passed onward, out to the terrace, and towards her pavilion. The sentry
at her door saluted her, but she gained her own ante-hall without meeting
any of her waiting men, even Maria was gaping in the crowd in the
courtyard probably.

Wilhelmine paused a moment in her antechamber on the first floor. She
listened attentively, and called Maria under her breath, but no answer
came. Then she drew out the little key, approached the door leading to
the statue gallery and opened it gently. The gallery was in darkness,
save where a faint white radiance was reflected from the moonlit garden
without, but that side of the palace lay in deep shadow. She crept on and
groped for the lock beneath the plaster Amorino's hand. At first she
could not find it, but after some moments she felt the tiny keyhole, and,
fitting the key, she turned it and the door swung open. She glided in
behind the arras, and found the spring which opened the partition. She
listened; there was no sound from the room within. She pressed the
spring, the tapestry door opened silently beneath her touch, and she
passed into the Duke's writing-closet. Here the moon shone full in, white
and ghostly. Wilhelmine's mind flew back to that far-off night at
Guestrow, when in the moonlight she had stolen the key from under her
mother's pillow. How she had trembled! She had been a child in experience
then, a very different being from the strong, self-confident woman she
knew herself to be nowadays. And yet she trembled in the moonlit room as
she had trembled then. What was that? The moonlight falling in sheeny
silver through the window, seemed to her to take the shape of a tall,
white woman's figure. She remembered the grim old legend of that Countess
of Orlamuende, murderess of little children, who haunted all the palaces
of her descendants. In the castle at Stuttgart, they said, the White Lady
walked, her pale trailing gar