oportion perfect, each
line harmonious. What a wealth of flowers bloomed in the Freudenthal
garden! How fragrant were the roses, the lilacs, the jasmine!

Here the Landhofmeisterin was wont to linger if his Highness were forced
to leave her for a few days. Here she would live a short span of peaceful
hours, ambition banished awhile, affairs of State forgotten. Here she
would sing again the songs she loved so well.

'Let us go to Freudenthal, et chantons les romances d'autrefois,' she
would say to Madame de Ruth and Zollern. Then his Highness would come
riding down the long, straight, narrow road from Ludwigsburg. He would
dismount at the orchard gate and call to her: 'Wilhelmine! Philomele!'
and for an hour the glamour of youth and an echo of the early days of a
great passion would return to them. Sometimes he would pray her to sing
again the melody which she had sung in the Rothenwald when they had first
loved; but alas! her voice was not the same. The beautiful notes were
there, the consummate art, but the world-hardness had laid its touch upon
her very music. True, Wilhelmine singing was always a being much more
tender, more pure than Wilhelmine woman of the world, still her voice
registered the hardening of her soul. Zollern said that when she sang
'she expressed all she was not,' and it was a cruel truth. Sometimes
there rang for an instant an infinite yearning, but it vanished, and the
cold, perfect, artificially passionate utterance resumed sway.

Now and then Eberhard Ludwig still wandered in the forest. He would leave
the company of hunters, and followed by faithful old Melac, the
wolf-hound, he escaped to revel in the silence and beauty of the
beechwood. Often he was terribly sad in those days. Wilhelmine perplexed
him; it was the hardness in her heart which made him suffer. He winced
when he heard even her glorious voice fraught with this new soul of
harshness. Often he endeavoured to tell her of his sadness, but she
laughed at him.

What more could he crave from her, indeed? She loved him, she was true to
him. Alas! he could not explain that it was the essence of her love which
had changed. She had no time to be sad, no time therefore to be tender.
Poor Eberhard Ludwig! poor brilliant, successful Wilhelmine! And yet, who
could blame her if she was greatly occupied? She was chief minister _de
facto_ of a country; she was finance minister of a queen, she was herself
queen; she was Master of the Ceremonies t