walled-in Lustgarten; but they urged her not to venture out of this shelter for a few weeks, after the expiration of which time they argued the popular excitement would have died out, or if it had not, they would make arrangements for her residence in some safe place across the frontier of Switzerland. Neuhaus they considered to be too near to Tuebingen, where, they heard, there was much hostility against Wilhelmine. Meanwhile each day the heat became more intense, and the Favourite grew more impatient of being forbidden to drive out. One evening, as she sat disconsolately in her salon, a faint, fresh breeze floated in through the open window. It was fragrant and delightful after the long, stifling hours, and it seemed to her like an invitation from the outer world, that world of tree and flower for which she yearned. How she longed to drive away out of the reeking, low-lying town, and wander in the cool Red Wood! Still the Lustgarten was a resource, and its quaint sixteenth- and seventeenth-century embellishments delighted her. She rose, and taking a lace mantilla, arranged it round her head. She passed out of the small door at the back of the Jaegerhaus, and strolled slowly along in the direction of the grotto. As she passed the gates leading from the garden to the high-road, she called to the sentry, telling him that should Monseigneur de Zollern seek her before she returned, he should be informed that she had gone to the Duke Christopher's Grotto. At first the soldier pretended not to hear, and the Graevenitz was obliged to approach him and give her message. She asked, angrily, if he was deaf, and was informed in the usual peasant idiom that he 'could hear as well as another.' 'Well, give my message to any one who inquires for me,' she said haughtily, and walked on. The man frowned evilly at her, and she recollected that the maid Maria, once when she had accompanied her mistress on a stroll in the Lustgarten, and they had passed the same sentry, had told her that he was the lover of Johanna Elizabetha's waiting-maid, the woman who had always been so insolent to Wilhelmine at the castle. 'He would do me harm, that lout, if he could,' Wilhelmine reflected as she walked on, and the man's frowning face haunted her for a time, but soon the freshness of the evening breeze and the garden's beauty drove all unquiet thoughts from her mind.