'Wilhelmine, do you love me? Alas! alas!'
'I love you, mon Prince, but these taunts are unbearable. I have no one to protect me—you cannot, for you yourself are the cause of all the indignities heaped upon me.'
'Ah, would that I could make you Duchess, my wife, safe from insult!'
'You dare not, though other princes have had the courage thus to shield those they loved.'
'I dare not? I? God! who shall tell me that I dare not?' he cried.
'You dare not,' she answered, and again as she swept from the room, over her shoulder she flung scornfully: 'You dare not!'
In the panelled living-room of the Neuhaus, on the morning of the 29th July 1707, Madame de Ruth and her peasant servant were busying themselves with a large table and a heap of silken hangings. The lady was draping the table with these, and her efforts had caused her highly piled-up head-dress to become deranged; the elaborate structure leaned on one side and scattered a shower of powder over Madame de Ruth's shoulders. The servant interrupted his work of hammering nails into the draped silk on the table; he stared at his mistress and grinned. 'Go on, stupid head, and never mind an old woman's hairdress,' she said good-humouredly. 'I shall be fine enough this afternoon, and so wilt thou, for I shall give thee a new coat.' She rose from her knees and surveyed her handiwork. Taking a large bowl filled with roses, she placed it upon the table, then she went to a cupboard and began to hunt through its varied contents. She sought a Bible, and indeed it was the first time in her life that she had searched the Scriptures, as she reflected grimly. She had a dim recollection of having seen a worn Bible consorting oddly with the other books in that cupboard. After some time she found the Bible and placed it upon the silk-draped table. She stood a moment absent-mindedly, gazing from the window at the sunlight playing through the delicate tracery in the beech branches without, her hands mechanically turning over the leaves of the Bible. Suddenly her fingers touched something between the pages, something that crumbled away beneath her touch, a withered flower, the faded, brittle ghost of some vanished summer day. She drew away her hand quickly as though the flower stung her. It had conjured up the long-past loss and sorrow of a day when she had given birth to a child and Death came hurrying to gather the little life. Madame de Ruth remembered how eagerly she had read in the Book of Life during the sad hours of her recovery, seeking wildly, miserably for consolation, and she recalled how the kind old peasant woman, who nursed and mourned with her for the baby's loss, had brought her a flower which bloomed near the piteously small mound beneath which the little one slept for ever. And Madame de Ruth had laid the blossom tenderly between the Bible's pages, and now, after long years of forgetful gaiety and dissipation, the yearning, unsatisfied motherhood welled up in her heart and she wept again.
Once more we are in the panelled room at Neuhaus, and again is assembled the company which on that portentous November evening of the preceding year had discussed the plan of summoning Wilhelmine von Grävenitz, she who was to be their tool in an ordinary court intrigue. Madame de Ruth, the hostess; Monseigneur de Zollern; Friedrich Grävenitz, since a few days become Count of the Empire; Marie Grävenitz, his bigoted Catholic wife; Monsieur the Hofmarshal Stafforth.