She divined rightly. Though his attempt to swim the Aller and storm the moat had never been told her, for a long while she had clung to the hope that he had some of the chivalry his father lacked; but he was a man of forty-five now, and she was still a prisoner; that hope had died with the others. Her daughter was a Queen, and that was all Sophia Dorothea knew of her. She soon ceased to think of them. She rose and went in to her dinner, which was served in the same room, at the same hour, always, always. Madame von Arlestein was not there; she had the whimsies of old age; they said she was failing fast. The other ladies were cowed and quiet; they had not been long with their mistress, and two of them had already petitioned to go home. Sophia Dorothea (Princess of Ahlden she was called, in ghastly compromise between the titles that were hers by right and the nonentity which she really was) was an object of terror to these ladies, by reason of her history, her punishment, her usual silence and her occasional passionate lashes of speech. Her appearance added to this horror she inspired; she still wore the fashions that were the mode when Mary Stewart set them in England and Madame de Maintenon in France, and this, added to her arrested beauty, more terrible than old age, made her like a creature resurrected from a dusty grave. When her clothes were renewed, which was seldom, they had been cut on the same pattern, but many of the garments she now wore were those that she had brought with her when she had first come to Schloss Ahlden. She wore now a gown of faded, crackling red silk, with a short petticoat of frilled blue sarcenet; her hair was piled up with the fan-shaped decoration of stiff lace that had been out of fashion a quarter of a century; her face had a curious bleached look: she was not wrinkled, but her fine features were as faded as her gown; she seemed bloodless, waxen, only in her eyes was that awful look of restlessness in terrible contrast with the lifelessness of her appearance. The ladies, each with her own warm life of human interest as a background for her thoughts, pitied her and shuddered at her, and in their hearts they counted the days until they should be relieved of their posts at Schloss Ahlden. For an hour, as always, they read and sewed after dinner, and, as always, the Princess sat rigid, looking into the fire. In summer she would look into the empty hearth in the same way; she had a great attraction for the fire or the fireplace. She was never long in a room before she would turn to it and sit in front of it, staring into the flames or the grate ready for them. The ladies, when alone, would sometimes dare to breathe the rumour that accounted for this; it was almost too horrid for utterance. It had to do with the manner in which Philip von Königsmarck had died.