'Let us go to Freudenthal, et chantons les romances d'autrefois,' she would say to Madame de Ruth and Zollern. Then his Highness would come riding down the long, straight, narrow road from Ludwigsburg. He would dismount at the orchard gate and call to her: 'Wilhelmine! Philomele!' and for an hour the glamour of youth and an echo of the early days of a great passion would return to them. Sometimes he would pray her to sing again the melody which she had sung in the Rothenwald when they had first loved; but alas! her voice was not the same. The beautiful notes were there, the consummate art, but the world-hardness had laid its touch upon her very music. True, Wilhelmine singing was always a being much more tender, more pure than Wilhelmine woman of the world, still her voice registered the hardening of her soul. Zollern said that when she sang 'she expressed all she was not,' and it was a cruel truth. Sometimes there rang for an instant an infinite yearning, but it vanished, and the cold, perfect, artificially passionate utterance resumed sway. Now and then Eberhard Ludwig still wandered in the forest. He would leave the company of hunters, and followed by faithful old Melac, the wolf-hound, he escaped to revel in the silence and beauty of the beechwood. Often he was terribly sad in those days. Wilhelmine perplexed him; it was the hardness in her heart which made him suffer. He winced when he heard even her glorious voice fraught with this new soul of harshness. Often he endeavoured to tell her of his sadness, but she laughed at him. What more could he crave from her, indeed? She loved him, she was true to him. Alas! he could not explain that it was the essence of her love which had changed. She had no time to be sad, no time therefore to be tender. Poor Eberhard Ludwig! poor brilliant, successful Wilhelmine! And yet, who could blame her if she was greatly occupied? She was chief minister _de facto_ of a country; she was finance minister of a queen, she was herself queen; she was Master of the Ceremonies to a court; she was purveyor of amusements to a great prince; yet she had lost the faculty to understand that this prince agonised because she was too occupied to give him tenderness. Passion she gave him, and brilliant gaiety; she tyrannised, flattered, charmed, cajoled him, what more could he desire? Only, he dreamed of the impossible; he dreamed of the love and friendship which remain, of the roses and kisses which do not fade and lose their savour. Of course, it was impossible; but from a dream's non-fulfilment a tragedy was preparing. The tragedy of satiety and inevitable disappointment. * * * * * All Wirtemberg was in the Landhofmeisterin's grasp, but two things disturbed her entire enjoyment of power: the continued residence of Johanna Elizabetha in Stuttgart, and the unrelenting disapproval of the Evangelical Church towards the unholy court of Ludwigsburg.