ragically as the price of
his infatuation for a Queen.

Betrayed by a jealous woman, the Countess Platen, whose overtures he
spurned, this too gallant lover of Sophia Dorothea of Celle, wife of the
first of our Georges, was foully done to death in a corridor of the
Leine Schloss by La Paten's hired assassins, while she looked smilingly
on at his futile struggle for life, and gloated over his dying agonies.

On the death of her father, when she was but a child of three, Aurora
was taken by her mother from her native Sweden to Hamburg, where she
grew to beautiful young womanhood; and when, in turn, her mother died,
she found a home with her married sister, the Countess Loewenhaupt. And
it is at this period of her life that her romantic story opens.

If we are to believe her contemporaries, the world has seldom seen so
much beauty and so many graces enshrined in the form of woman as in this
daughter of Sweden. Her description reads like a catalogue of all human
perfections. Of medium height and a figure as faultless in its exquisite
modelling as in its grace and suppleness; her hair, black as a raven's
plumage, and falling, like a veil of night, below her knees, emphasised
the white purity of face and throat, arms, and hands. Her teeth, twin
rows of pearls, glistened between smiling crimson lips, curved like
Cupid's bow. Her face of perfect oval, with its delicately moulded
features, was illuminated by a pair of large black eyes, now melting,
now flaming, as mood succeeded mood.

To these graces of body were allied equal graces of mind and character.
Her conversation sparkled with wit and wisdom; she could hold fluent
discourse in half a dozen tongues; she played and sang divinely, wrote
elegant verses, and painted dainty pictures. Her manner was caressing
and courteous; she was generous to a fault, with a heart as tender as it
was large. And the supreme touch was added by an entire unconsciousness
of her charms, and an unaffected modesty which captivated all hearts.

Such was Aurora of Koenigsmarck who, in company with her sister, set
forth one day to claim the fortune which her ill-fated brother, Philip,
was said to have left in the custody of his Hanoverian bankers--a
journey which was to make such a dramatic revolution in her own life.

Arrived at Hanover the sisters found themselves faced by no easy task.
The bankers declared that they had nothing of the late Count's effects
beyond a few diamonds, which they decl