Pray believe this from your most humble and affectionate servant.” ----- Footnote 77: A reference to their early friendship. Footnote 78: This is a reference to the fact that some of the Princess’s letters to him at this time were dictated by her only, and actually written by Knesebeck (_La Confidente_) to disarm suspicion. Some too she wrote in a disguised hand. ----- Sophie Dorothea was by nature weak in judgment, strong in passion. She could not sit down and pen the sentence of what she supposed must be lifelong wretchedness to her lover, and urge him to marry while his heart was still wholly devoted to her. She had neither the courage nor the firmness to insist on separation; in fact, until she came face to face with the alternative of giving him up for ever, she had not realised how much she loved him nor how great an influence he had gained over her. So the marriage scheme was dropped. She wrote him to the effect that she could not help loving him, but he must restrain himself and be more prudent in the future. She was rewarded by an ecstatic reply:— “I am the happiest man in the world. If it be true that you love me as you say, and your love will last always, where is the bliss to equal mine? I fear my joy will be too apparent, that every one will see in my eyes it can only emanate from you. I will restrain myself as much as I can; but ‘when the heart is so proud the eyes play the traitor’. Your eyes, more than I dared hope, declared to me last evening the feelings of your heart. I am so overjoyed that I am hardly able to express myself. I hope to tell you this evening all I am not writing.” It was now the autumn. Military operations in Flanders had reopened in the summer, but the campaign of 1691 had been more or less of a farce. The two armies, that of William and that of Louis, had marched and counter-marched, advanced and retreated, without coming to an engagement, and after having thus performed a stately minuet for some months, both armies retired to winter quarters. The Brunswick prince took no part in the campaign, and all this time Prince George Louis, who was very friendly with William, had been sulking over his enforced inaction at home. In October he was seized with a serious attack of measles.[79] His illness aroused the slumbering sympathies of his wife, and she nursed him towards recovery; doubtless she felt that such conduct was the best answer to the malicious tales of her enemies. Königsmarck was thrown into despair on hearing of the improved relations between Sophie Dorothea and her husband, for his passion for her was very virile and very selfish. He addressed to her this jealous protest:—