icence of Ludwigsburg smote her as an insult. She
shuddered at the remembrance of the endless reproductions of her enemy's
features: the whole palace was a marble homage to the Graevenitz, a
beautiful, enduring, kingly homage.

But the palace chapel! Ah! that was the worst of all, a very blasphemy.
And yet how wondrous beautiful it was, this palace.

She closed her eyes, but in the darkness she saw again the smiling face
of the woman who had ruined her life; she saw the graceful figure in the
chapel medallion, the voluptuous parted lips of the carven angel who held
the canopy over the pulpit, the delicately chiselled features of the
Aphrodites and the nymphs which she had been forced to pass in the
palace, and each one of which bore a resemblance to the Duke's mistress.

The sun was setting behind Hohenasperg, and a blood-red glow lingered in
the sky over the south-westerly hills of the Rothwald. The peasants were
going homeward after their day's work; already their sickles had cut
great gaping wounds in the waving, yellow beauty of the corn-fields. A
fresh north breeze sprang up and sent the white dust whirling in clouds
behind the Duchess's coach. And the north wind brought Johanna Elizabetha
another pang, for it wafted to her a sound of music from Ludwigsburg. The
musicians of the Silver Guards were playing a merry strain in the palace
gardens.

To the forsaken, humiliated woman this moment was symbolic of her whole
life: she journeying alone down the dusty road towards the gathering
gloom over Stuttgart; Eberhard Ludwig and the Landhofmeisterin at their
beautiful palace living in music and revelry.

CHAPTER XIX

THE GREAT TRIUMPH AND THE SHADOW

FOR years Germany had gossiped over the so-called 'Persian Court' of
Leopold Eberhard of Wirtemberg, Duke of Moempelgard. This prince had been
so pampered by his mother, Anne de Coligny, that he reached the age of
twelve years without having learned to read or write. When the
over-tender mother died, the boy's father, Duke George, took his
dunce-son's education in hand; but this gentleman was peculiar in his
notions of the training of young minds. French and German he deemed
unnecessary trivialities, and the Christian religion a banality. Instead
of these prosaic lessons the boy was instructed in the Arabic, Hebrew,
and Persian tongues, and, in lieu of the Bible, the Koran was placed in
his hands.

A handsome, reckless, passionate youth, imbued with the comf