Madame de Ruth accompanied her Highness to her coach, and in broken words the Duchess thanked her. 'If Fate turns against you here, Madame, you will find a welcome at Stuttgart in memory of your kindness on this most miserable day,' she said. But Madame de Ruth shook her head. She was of the Ludwigsburg world, and when Frivolity forgot her she knew that she would need no other refuge than six foot of earth beside her dead child. Wearily the Duchess took her way homeward. There was no spark of hope left in her heart now; she only raged that she had humbled herself, and to no avail. The magnificence of Ludwigsburg smote her as an insult. She shuddered at the remembrance of the endless reproductions of her enemy's features: the whole palace was a marble homage to the Graevenitz, a beautiful, enduring, kingly homage. But the palace chapel! Ah! that was the worst of all, a very blasphemy. And yet how wondrous beautiful it was, this palace. She closed her eyes, but in the darkness she saw again the smiling face of the woman who had ruined her life; she saw the graceful figure in the chapel medallion, the voluptuous parted lips of the carven angel who held the canopy over the pulpit, the delicately chiselled features of the Aphrodites and the nymphs which she had been forced to pass in the palace, and each one of which bore a resemblance to the Duke's mistress. The sun was setting behind Hohenasperg, and a blood-red glow lingered in the sky over the south-westerly hills of the Rothwald. The peasants were going homeward after their day's work; already their sickles had cut great gaping wounds in the waving, yellow beauty of the corn-fields. A fresh north breeze sprang up and sent the white dust whirling in clouds behind the Duchess's coach. And the north wind brought Johanna Elizabetha another pang, for it wafted to her a sound of music from Ludwigsburg. The musicians of the Silver Guards were playing a merry strain in the palace gardens. To the forsaken, humiliated woman this moment was symbolic of her whole life: she journeying alone down the dusty road towards the gathering gloom over Stuttgart; Eberhard Ludwig and the Landhofmeisterin at their beautiful palace living in music and revelry. CHAPTER XIX THE GREAT TRIUMPH AND THE SHADOW FOR years Germany had gossiped over the so-called 'Persian Court' of Leopold Eberhard of Wirtemberg, Duke of Moempelgard. This prince had been so pampered by his mother, Anne de Coligny, that he reached the age of twelve years without having learned to read or write. When the over-tender mother died, the boy's father, Duke George, took his dunce-son's education in hand; but this gentleman was peculiar in his notions of the training of young minds. French and German he deemed unnecessary trivialities, and the Christian religion a banality. Instead of these prosaic lessons the boy was instructed in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian tongues, and, in lieu of the Bible, the Koran was placed in his hands.