Sophia Dorothea, as soon as she descended at the gates of her father’s residence, found a mother there, indeed, ready to receive her with the arms of a mother’s love, and to feel that the love was showered upon a daughter worthy of it. Not of like quality were the old duke’s feelings. Communications had been made to him from Hanover, to the effect that his daughter was obstinate, disobedient, disrespectful to the Elector and Electress, neglectful of her children, and faithless in heart, if not in fact, to their father. The Duke of Zell had been, as he thought, slow to believe the charges brought against his child’s good name, and had applied to the Elector for some further explanation. But poor Ernest Augustus was just then perplexed by another domestic quarrel. His son, the ever troublesome Prince Maximilian, having long entertained a suspicion that the Countess von Platen’s denial of the light offence laid to her charge, of wearing _rouge_, was also a playful denial, mischievously proved the fact one day, by not very gallantly ‘flicking’ from his finger a little water in which peas had been boiled, and which was then a popularly mischievous test to try the presence of _rouge_, as, if the latter were there, the pea-water left an indelible _fleck_ or stain upon it. At this indignity, the Countess von Platen was the more enraged as her denial had been disproved. She rushed to the feet of the Elector, and told her complaint with an energy as if the whole state were in peril. The Elector listened, threatened Prince Maximilian with arrest, and wished his family were as easy to govern as his electoral dominions. He had scarcely relieved himself of this particular source of trouble, by binding Prince Maximilian to his good behaviour, when he was applied to by the Duke of Zell on the subject of his daughter. He angrily referred the duke to three of his ministers, who, he said, were acquainted with the facts. Now these ministers were the men who had expressly distorted them. These worthy persons, if report may be trusted, performed their wicked office with as wicked an alacrity. However the result was reached, its existence cannot be denied, and its consequences were fatal to Sophia Dorothea. The Electress Sophia is said to have at last so thoroughly hated her daughter-in-law, as to have entered partly into these misrepresentations, which acquired for her the temporary wrath of her father. But of this enmity of her mother-in-law the younger Sophia does not appear to have suspected anything. Sophia Dorothea, at all events, bore her father’s temporary aversion with a wondering patience, satisfied that ‘time and the hour’ would at length do her justice.