The service was held in the private chapel, and the Mistress of the Robes led the bride to the altar. When the priest came to the place where the bride is told to answer “Yes,” she was compelled by etiquette to curtsey to the Mistress of the Robes and ask her permission to do so. Then the Mistress of the Robes stood up, turned herself round to face the chapel in which the Empress was, and in her turn curtsied, and in dumb show asked Her Majesty’s consent. This was also given by signs, and the Mistress of the Robes, in the same silent way, transmitted the pleasure of the Empress, who had taken upon herself the duties of mother, upon which the bride gratefully curtsied, turned to the priest and uttered the fateful “Yes.” There is something touching in the way in which the Empress mothered the orphan whom she had almost kidnapped from the Wolfenbüttel officers. She surely did not perform her duty by halves! When I read the account of the wedding ceremony, my mind went back fifty-two years to another wedding, when in St. George’s Chapel another Queen, recently widowed, sat in a little gallery and acknowledged the curtsey of her new daughter-in-law, one of the loveliest brides that ever sun shone upon. At every step in this sketch of the Austrian Empress we are met by something that speaks of our own great Queen. In this wise was the wedding of one of the Imperial handmaidens celebrated in the days of Marie Theresia. Charlotte, now Frau von Greiner, entered happily upon her new life. The change from the excitement and publicity of the brilliant Austrian Court, to the quiet and narrower society of the upper middle-class, for whom the Imperial surroundings were a thing of awe and mystery, must have been very striking. But the bride found her account in it, and, as we shall see, Herr von Greiner, being a man of quite exceptional talent and artistic gifts, was able to attract to his house all that was most brilliant among the literary and musical celebrities of that time.