en to such official eminence as Joseph Suess Oppenheimer, and there is
little doubt that, had he not been of the race of Israel, even though he
had committed the same crimes, he would not have suffered this fearsome
death.

CHAPTER XXII

REST

'Memories that make the heart a tomb.'

THERE is solace to the mourner in the sound of rushing waters; most of
all can the stricken soul find a short oblivion in the ceaseless chant of
the ocean's mighty surging; and by the tumult of a great river human
unrest is soothed ineffably.

At Schaffhausen the Rhine falls in giant cascades, roaring and dashing
against those rocks which, legend says, Wotan flung into the river in his
mighty rage against a poor husbandman who had drowned himself and his
lowly wife because her mortal beauty had excited the desire of the
amorous wanderer.

White, whirling foam, and above a thin, glistening, veil-like mist made
of the myriad drops flung up from the water's impact; but here too the
eternal poet, Legend, has wrought a delicate phantasy: this mist he calls
the breath from the lips of the Rhine-maidens who sing for ever beneath
the foam.

An enchanted place this Schaffhausen, guarded by the great white Alps
whose pure crests rise in awful majesty to high Heaven. And here it was
that the Graevenitz dwelt after she left Wirtemberg, and here Time the
consoler healed her bruised heart and her crushed pride. She dwelt in the
small castle which Zollern had given her and where her marriage with
Wuerben had been solemnised. Her soul rested from pain, but there were
torturing ghosts of the past around her: Eberhard Ludwig, Madame de Ruth,
Zollern, her unkind brother, even the fraudulent attorney Schuetz, and the
ridiculous figure of her name-husband, Nepomuk Wuerben. Yes, all her
life's denizens had vanished. Death or absence had swallowed them; only
she, the central figure, remained.

She was memory-haunted, who herself was but a memory.

Her great healthfulness endured, but sometimes she suffered from strange
swoons. 'It is from the heart,' said the apothecary whom Maria called in.

'God knows--heart affliction!' said the Graevenitz bitterly, when they
told her of this verdict.

Years passed, and still she lingered at Schaffhausen, though she often
promised herself to journey to Berlin armed with that 'Letter of Royal
Protection' which Zollern had procured for her from Prussia's first King
Friedrich I. But she shrank from bringi