Stuttgart in the winter is a vastly different place to the smiling, gay Stuttgart of spring and summer days, and Wilhelmine often wondered whither had vanished the charm, the delight of Southern Germany. That winter there fell but little snow, a cruel black frost was over the whole valley; sometimes the frost relaxed his iron grip, and then came torrents of rain. The frost returned when the rain ceased, and taking the wet earth into his gaunt hands turned everything into dirty sheet ice. In Wilhelmine's yellow room at the Jaegerhaus the blue stove radiated a pleasant warmth, and, if a feeble sunray struggled through the gloomy, leaden sky, the yellow hangings caught it like a lover, and seemed to treasure it, filling the whole room with a hint of spring sunshine. In the castle the Duchess sat in her sombre apartments which she had made as dull, as dreary, as charmless as herself. Eberhard Ludwig seldom visited her, and she spent her time in cosseting the sickly Erbprinz, or bemoaning her fate to Madame de Stafforth. Slowly the winter left the land, but the spring that year was a meagre starveling, niggardly of smiles. He seemed to have borrowed winter's breath, and the pale young leaves shuddered in the unfriendly blasts. The fruit blossom struggled into a nipped existence, and fell like thin snow to the ground. An eerie spring, and men said there was a spell upon the country, and looked towards the Jaegerhaus as they spoke. During the winter the French army under Marechal Villars had again threatened Wirtemberg. On a cheerless day towards the end of April Eberhard Ludwig arrived as usual in the early morning to visit his beloved at the Jaegerhaus. For several days she had noticed a cloud upon his brow, he had answered her absently, and she knew instinctively that there was something on his mind, which he desired to tell her. Too wise to question him, she watched him closely. When he entered the yellow-hung salon that cheerless April morning, he greeted her almost coldly, and began to play roughly with his huge black wolf-hound, Melac. This animal was the Duke's constant companion--an extraordinarily sagacious beast, whom Wilhelmine declared to be a hater of dullness because he had ever been surly towards Johanna Elizabetha. For the favourite the dog had a marked affection; he would lie near her with his large head resting on her foot, while his patient eyes looked up at her with that strange, unblinking gaze which is characteristic of the wolf-hound.