ntess at his right hand; and seldom
has festival had such a setting in tragedy. "None of the guests," we are
told, "uttered a word or ate a mouthful of anything; the plates were
cleared at the hasty ringing of a bell. A convulsive movement made by
the sick man showed that he was suffering agonies. Before half-past nine
every guest had left, greatly troubled. The majority of those who had
been present never saw the unfortunate monarch again. They all shared
the same presentiment of disaster, and wept."

From that night the King was dead, even to his own Court. The gates of
his palace were closed against the world, and none were allowed to
approach the chamber in which his life was ebbing away, save the
Countess, his nurse, and his doctors. Even his children were refused
admittance to his presence. As the Marquis de Saint Mexent said, "The
King of Prussia ends his days as though he were a rich benefactor. All
the relations are excluded by the housekeeper."

A few days before the end came the Countess was seen to leave the
palace, carrying a large red portfolio--a suspicious circumstance which
the Crown Prince's spies promptly reported to their master. There could
be only one inference--she had been caught in the act of stealing State
papers, a crime for which she would have to pay a heavy price as soon
as her protector was no more! As a matter of fact the portfolio
contained nothing more secret or valuable than the letters she had
written to the King during the twenty-seven years of their romance,
letters which, after reading, she consigned to the flames in her boudoir
within an hour of the suspected theft of State documents.

A few days later, on the night of the 16th of November (1797), the King
entered on his "death agony," one fit of suffocation succeeding another,
until the Countess, unable to bear any longer the sight of such
suffering, was carried away in violent convulsions. She saw him no more;
for by seven o'clock in the morning Frederick William had found release
from his agony in death, and his son had begun to reign in his stead.

At last the long-delayed hour of revenge had come to Frederick William
III., who had always regarded his father's favourite as an enemy; and
his vengeance was swift to strike. Before the late King's body was cold,
his successor's emissaries appeared at the palace door, Unter den
Linden, with orders to search her papers and to demand the keys of every
desk and cupboard. Even then