It was never the custom of Duchess Sophia to keep her girls shut up in the women’s apartments. We are constantly meeting her and them, making the long descent from the Wartburg to the town of Eisenach. Sometimes it would be to take their part in a church festival; sometimes, perhaps, to listen to the preaching of a “Kreuzzug prediger,” and sometimes for that direct training in Christian Charity, which was so characteristic of the Middle Ages. There was no hiding away of the poor in those days in their own slums. They displayed themselves, and their sores, and their nakedness at the doors of Princes, and claimed the noblest as their servants. So Duchess Sophia and her girls went into the huts of the poorest, and tended them like sisters. And all this time the great realities of life were playing their part in Elizabeth’s education. She had hardly been two years in the Wartburg when the dreadful news of her mother’s assassination was brought to her. Was she too young, little six-year-old girl that she was, fully to understand? But on the Saint Sylvester Day of the year 1216, another blow befell, not her alone, but all those who dwelt on the Wartburg—young Hermann, her betrothed, died suddenly, and amid the wailing of the “Media Vita,” which surrounded the bier of his son, Duke Hermann lost his reason. For a year he sat in darkness and the shadow of death, murmuring ever the terrible psalm: “In the Midst of Life we are in Death.” He died in the year following, 1217. He was laid to rest in the convent he had founded, and young Ludwig reigned in his stead. What was to become of Elizabeth? There were many who said, “let her be sent back to her father. The Arpad rule is weakening in Hungary, as witness Queen Gertrude’s murder. Her dowry, too, hath never been paid in full.” Duchess Sophia was of this way of thinking. She was nervous and irritable after the terrible strain of her husband’s illness, and the shock of her son’s death. But there were two people who were determined that justice should be done to the little stranger, who had left home and kindred, on the promise of becoming, one day, Landgräfin of Thuringia. One of these two was old Walther of Varilla, who had brought her from her Hungarian home, and watched over her tenderly ever since. The other was Landgraf Ludwig, into whose heart she had stolen, all unknown, when she was a tiny girl; and whose chivalrous soul could not bear to inflict an ignominy on her. So it came to pass that, in the Burgkapelle, whither Elizabeth had turned so often from her play, she stood one day with her hand in Ludwig’s, and plighted her eternal troth. CECILIA GONZAGA A Little Italian Schoolgirl of the Renaissance PART I.—A DOMINICAN EDUCATIONIST.