One evening towards the middle of April, the Duchess had withdrawn as usual to her own apartments leaving Madame de Stafforth in the chief salon reading a sermon by an eminent Swiss divine. The two ladies had felt strangely nervous and anxious during the afternoon, and several times it had seemed to her Highness that she heard stealthy footsteps on the inner gallery of the courtyard, but when she questioned the page-in-waiting whose duty it was to watch at the door of the ante-hall leading to her Highness's rooms, the youth replied that he had seen and heard nothing. The Duchess told herself she was becoming a fearsome, anxious old woman, and she endeavoured to smile down the haunting feeling of some unseen, creeping presence. Still it was with a sense of trepidation that she entered the small room where she was wont to meditate each evening when the day's wearisome, self-imposed labours were ended. This room lay beyond her Highness's sleeping chamber and had a small balcony looking over the Lustgarten. This apartment was plainly furnished, almost monastic in its simplicity: one chair, a small bureau, a table on which lay a few books of sermons and volumes of theological treatises, and a praying-stool stood against the wall. The only thing recalling the vanities of the world was a mirror let into the panel above the praying-stool. Indeed, this mirror was a relic of one of poor Johanna Elizabetha's few happy hours. Eberhard Ludwig had ordered the whole room to be panelled with mirrors, having seen some such conceit in a chateau in France during his travels. He had thought to please her Highness by this attention, but the dull, awkward woman had forbidden the completion of the plan: it was a wrongful waste of money, she averred, and a French vanity! So Eberhard Ludwig had angrily commanded the workmen to desist, and, wounded and offended, he had reflected on his wife's lack of appreciation of the little elegancies of life. True, she had seemed pleased by his thought of her, she had thanked him--but she had declined his present! The only alteration in the castle which Johanna Elizabetha had ever been known to order had been done, to the surprise of all, some time after the Duke's desertion of his wife and son. The entire suite of apartments which her Highness occupied had been redecorated. The panelling, which was of time-mellowed oak, the Duchess had caused to be painted black, the chairs and tables of her rooms were covered with black brocade, and the window curtains were fashioned of the same sombre material. It was a strange fancy, the exaggeration of a brain strung up, taut and strained to a quivering line on the border of insanity. Yet the Duchess was not mad, only sad to desperation, utterly humiliated, shuddering with despair and shame. Possibly the unhappy woman, shut into the silence of her dumb personality, had here sought to give expression to her voiceless agony.