Still the imperial answer tarried. It behoved Eberhard Ludwig to announce his marriage formally to the officials at Stuttgart. Wilhelmine enjoying the prospect of the scene urged Serenissimus to summon his Geheimraethe, or Privy Councillors, to Urach immediately. They were to arrive at the castle in the afternoon, she decided; the marriage was to be announced, then a State banquet was to take place in the ancient tilting-hall beneath the castle. This latter, of course, she would not attend; but it would be followed by a grand ball in the Golden Hall, where all should greet her as Queen of the Revels, as legal wife of their Duke, as Countess of Urach and future Duchess of Wirtemberg. Thus it befell that on the 15th of September 1707, eight pompous gentlemen, Geheimraethe of the Dukedom, arrived at the castle of Urach. They were met with much ceremony at the gate and conducted to the Golden Hall. A delightful quaint place this: picture to yourself a large apartment, three sides of which open out in lattice windows through which, if your eye wanders, you see the rounded Swabian hills densely clad in beech and pine. On the summit of one of the nearest of these hills stands the grim fortress of Hohen-Urach, an impregnable stronghold of mediaeval days turned prison in the eighteenth century. The Golden Hall is decorated, as its name portends, with gilded devices on the wall, with stately golden pilasters and formal green-painted trees, whose branches meander quaintly over one entire wall of the room, that wall unbroken by the windows. Over the two heavily carved doors the tree-branches twine and twist into the word 'ATTEMPTO,' the proud motto of Count Eberhard 'the Bearded,' a great gentleman of the Cinque cento, whose nuptials with a Princess of Mantua were celebrated in the same Golden Hall. In memory whereof their nuptial bed still stood in the hall where Eberhard Ludwig assembled his Privy Council for the announcement of his marriage with Wilhelmine von Graevenitz, the Mecklemburg adventuress. The councillors kept waiting in the Golden Hall guessed the preposterous demand their Duke would make to them. They were in a fine quandary. What to say to a Prince who answered questions of legal right by: 'I am above the law, alter the petty phrase in your code-book.' A Prince, mark you, who could punish resistance with death. And yet at Vienna was a suzerain who might chastise the official participators in a crime against the Empire's laws. So the eight councillors stood moodily waiting for their Prince to appear, and contemplating with anger the elaborate preparations for the evening's feast. Such flowers, such rich hangings, and what were those two fine chairs? The Duke was coming; they heard a woman's voice in the corridor, a woman's laugh--most unseemly. His Highness greeted them ceremoniously, and then: