'You are a woman no man can forget,' he answered. Then he told her how that evening in the castle garden he had known he loved her; how he had dreaded giving himself up to a passion which he divined would prove so absorbing as to turn him from his cherished military ambition. He poured out to her his life's history, all his dreams of brilliant feats of arms, the raising of his duchy to a kingdom; he told her of his bitter disappointment when he found these ambitions were incomprehensible to the Duchess Johanna Elizabetha; of how, gradually, he had awakened to the fact that he was tied to a woman who utterly lacked in sympathy, and thus wearied him and drove him to seek consolation and amusement in the light loves and fancies of court gallantry, and then how each lady's charms had palled inevitably. 'And now,' he paused, 'now I feel that all my life began when first I heard your voice! I have been fighting with my thoughts ever since. Beloved! I have nothing to offer you--you are too pure to take the only position I could give you--and I love you too well to ask you.' She looked at him, and a smile touched her lips and vanished almost before it was born. 'Mon poete,' she whispered, and stretched out both hands to him; he took them in his, and drew her towards him. One thick curl of hair had fallen forward on her neck, he lifted it and buried his face in it, kissing it wildly, breathing in its fragrance. 'I love you,' he said again, and drew her, unresisting, into his arms. 'Philomele! Ah!' and his lips met hers. Overhead a bird burst forth into a rhapsody of song. CHAPTER VII THE FULFILMENT NOW began for Wilhelmine a time of strangely mixed and contending emotions. She loved Eberhard Ludwig with all that fervour and lavish freshness which we give to our first love; she longed to surrender to his passion, yet she held back with a modesty of maidenly reserve which her many jealous enemies ascribed to calculation, or else entirely denied, alleging that she was a mere adventuress plying her illicit trade according to her habit. Of a truth, there may have been a shade of strategy in her virtuous hesitation, for Madame de Ruth, who had returned to Stuttgart post-haste on hearing of his Highness's advent, constantly counselled her to hold back. Wilhelmine herself realised that a battle's importance is generally gauged by its difficulty, and the ultimate victory more highly prized if hardly won. Sometimes she wondered why she knew these things, and laughingly she told Madame de Ruth of this. 'Dear child,' said the old woman with her thin, satirical smile, 'we women come into the world knowing such things; whereas men--poor, beloved fools!--need experience, philosophy, and the Lord knows what, to teach them. Alas! by the time they have learned they no longer need their knowledge, for by that time cruel old age has got them in its grey, dull clutches.'