sisters helped to cheer his exile in Elba; for the brother she loved
and feared was the only man to whom Pauline's fickle heart was ever
true. She even stripped herself of all her jewels to make the way smooth
back to his crown. And when at last news came to her at Rome of his
death at St Helena it was she who shed the bitterest tears and refused
to be comforted. That an empire was lost, was nothing compared with the
loss of the brother who had always been so lenient to her failings, so
responsive to her love.

Two years later her own end came at Florence. When she felt the cold
hand of death on her, she called feebly for a mirror, that she might
look for the last time on her beauty. "Thank God," she whispered, as she
gazed, "I am still lovely! I am ready to die." A few moments later, with
the mirror still clutched in her hand, and her eyes still feasting on
the charms which time and death itself were powerless to dim, died
Pauline Bonaparte, sister of an Emperor and herself an Empress by the
right of her incomparable beauty.

CHAPTER XI

A SIREN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

When Wilhelmine Encke first opened her eyes on the world one day in the
year 1754, he would have been a bold prophet who would have predicted
that she would one day be the uncrowned Queen of the Court of Russia,
_plus Reine que la Reine_, and that her children would have in their
veins the proudest blood in Europe. Such a prophecy might well have been
laughed to scorn, for little Wilhelmine had as obscure a cradle as
almost any infant in all Prussia. Her father was an army bugler, who
wore private's uniform in Frederick the Great's army; and her early
years were to be spent playing with other soldiers' children in the
sordid environment of Berlin barracks.

When her father turned his back on the army, while Wilhelmine was still
nursing her dolls, it was to play the humble role of landlord of a small
tavern, from which he was lured by the bait of a place as French-horn
player in Frederick's private band; and the goal of his modest ambition
was reached when he was appointed trumpeter to the King.

This was Herr Encke's position when the curtain rises on our story at
Potsdam, and shows us Wilhelmine, an unattractive maid of ten, the
Cinderella of her family, for whom there seemed no better prospect than
a soldier-husband, if indeed she were lucky enough to capture him. She
was, in fact, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, removed