The _New York Herald_, reviewing her American career a few years later, said: “In New York she became somewhat notorious for her risqué costumes. On one occasion Fräulein Stübel attended the Arion Ball in male costume, and created a scene when ejected. This conduct seems to have ended her career in the United States.” This beautiful and spirited plebeian swam into the ken of Johann Salvator, of Austria, in the fall of 1888, when that impetuous prince had already been dismissed from the army and his other affairs were gathering to the storm that broke some months afterward. Catastrophic events followed rapidly. [Illustration: ~~ MILLIE STÜBEL ~~] In January, 1889, Prince Rudolf was found dead in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, with the Baroness Marie Vetsera, to whom the heir of a hundred kings is said to have been passionately devoted, and with whom he may have died in a suicide pact, though it has been said the crown prince and his sweetheart were murdered by persons whose identity has been sedulously concealed. This mysterious fatality robbed the dispirited Johann Salvator of his closest and most powerful friend. It may have had a good deal to do with what followed. A few months later Johann Salvator married morganatically his stage beauty. It was now, after the lapse of a few months, that he resigned all rank, title, and privileges, left Austria with his wife, and married her civilly in London. Naturally enough, it has generally been held that the death of the crown prince and the romance with the singer explained everything. The archduke, in disgrace with the army, bereft of his truest and most illustrious friend, and deeply infatuated with a girl whom he could not fully legitimatize as his wife, so long as he wore the purple of his birth, had decided to “surrender all for love” and seek solace in foreign lands with the lady of his choice. This interpretation has all the elements of color and sweetness needed for conviction in the minds of the sentimental. Unfortunately, it does not seem to bear skeptical examination. Even granting that Archduke Johann Salvator was a man of independent mind and quixotic temperament, that he was embittered by his demotion from military rank, and that he must have been greatly depressed by the death of Rudolf, who was both his bosom friend and his most powerful intercessor at court, no such extreme proceeding as the renunciation of all rank and the severing of family ties was called for.