. It was time, she
must hasten--and yet she lingered. She leaned on the balustrade and
contemplated the palace. Her thoughts travelled back to the days when
Ludwigsburg was still a-building, and she and Eberhard Ludwig had planned
the gardens together.

'Here should be a parterre of roses,' she had said.

'Nay, jasmine and heliotrope here; the roses must be beneath your window
to sigh out their souls before your shrine,' he had answered.

Could it be ended? The habit of years was too strong, she could not
realise. She listened to the summer sounds in the garden: the rustle of
the gentle breeze in the chestnut-trees, the chirping of the
grasshoppers, the bees droning over the flowers. Spring was past, it was
summer. 'Ah! winter for me; winter and sadness for ever now,' she moaned.
The sun was sinking--she must fly. 'Farewell happiness!' she murmured,
and with bent head she passed down the terrace steps and entered her
coach.

As she drove down the avenue she heard a bugle ring out from the
Ludwigsburg casern.

'Ride faster, hasten to Freudenthal!' she called to her postillions, and
at a gallop the Landhofmeisterin's coach thundered away westwards to the
distant line of hills where lay Freudenthal. Once she turned as she
passed through the Ludwigsburg gates. She turned and saw the great roofs
of the palace which had been reared for her, and whence she was
henceforward banished for ever.

CHAPTER XXI

THE DOWNFALL

'Life is but a vision--what I see
Of all which lives alone is life to me,
And being so--the absent are the dead,
Who haunt us from tranquillity, and spread
A dreary shroud around us, and invest
With sad remembrances our hours of rest.
The absent are the dead--for they are cold.'

BYRON.

FREUDENTHAL was full of ghosts for the Graevenitz: Madame de Ruth, her
dead friend; Zollern, who had bade her farewell for ever; and Eberhard
Ludwig, the unfaithful lover of her vanished youth. She walked in the
gardens, listening involuntarily for the voice which had so often called
'Philomele beloved' from the orchard gate. There was no consolation on
earth for her, she knew that; all she had loved, all she had achieved,
her power, her great honours, were dead things. The forced inaction of
her future tortured her. How would she pass the long dreary hours of the
rest of her life? True, the Jewish community of Freudenthal had