Too impatient to tarry, and too eager to care for ceremony, she mounted the stairs, bade a groom of the chamber point out to her the door of the duke’s room; and, her order having been obeyed, she forthwith pushed open the door, entered the apartment, and discovered the dismayed duke in the most _negligé_ of _déshabilles_. She neither made apology nor would receive any; but, intimating that she came upon business, at once asked, ‘Where is your wife?’ The flurried Duke of Zell pointed through an open door to a capacious bed in the adjacent room, wherein lay the wondering duchess, lost in eider-down and deep amazement. The ‘old Sophia’ could have wished, it would seem, that she had been further off. She was not quite rude enough to close the door, and so cut off all communication and listening; but, remembering that the Duchess of Zell was but very indifferently acquainted with German, she ceased to speak in the language then common to the German courts--French--and immediately addressed the duke in hard Teutonic phrase, which was unintelligible to the vexed and suspecting duchess. Half undressed, the duke occupied a chair close to his toilet-table, while the astute wife of Ernest Augustus, seated near him, unfolded a narrative to which he listened with every moment an increase of complacency and conviction. The Duchess Eleanora, from her bed in the adjacent room, could see the actors, but could not comprehend the dialogue. But, if the narrative was unintelligible to her, she could understand the drift of the argument, as the names of her daughter and lover were being constantly pronounced with that of George Louis. The case was forcibly put by the mother of George. She showed how union makes strength, how little profit could arise from a match between Sophia Dorothea and Augustus of Wolfenbüttel, and how advantageous must be an union between the heir of Hanover and the heiress of the domains which her provident father had added to Zell, and had bequeathed to his daughter. She spoke of the certainty of Ernest Augustus being created arch-standard-bearer of the empire of Germany, and therewith Elector of Hanover. She hinted at the possibility even of Sophia Dorothea one day sharing with her son the throne of Great Britain. The hint was something premature, but the astute lady _may_ have strengthened her case by reminding her hearer that the crown of England would most probably be reserved only for a Protestant succession, and that her son was, if a distant, yet not a very distant, and certainly a possible heir. The obsequious Duke of Zell was bewildered by the visions of greatness presented to his mind by his clever sister-in-law. With ready lack of honesty he consented to break off the match between Sophia Dorothea and her lover, and to bestow her hand upon the careless prince for whom it was now demanded by his mother. The latter returned to Hanover perfectly satisfied with the work of that night and morning.