So it proved to be; Reginald turned up, as
affectionate, as frank, as forward as ever.
"Helen, dear, you know I should have been
here years ago to greet you (Baron, I beg your
pardon for having been your wife's first lover),
but the Electress would not let me go. How
lovely you are! lovelier than ever! And how do
you make out your life here? (Baron, I beg
your pardon, but I and Helen never had any
secrets save one, and that was no secret.) Good
hunting? good shooting?—and, dear, do you
keep up your music? We shall get through,
somehow, here."
"We" replied the young bride, rather
haughtily. " The Baron has been called to
court, and we are leaving Oranienberg
tomorrow."
"Ah!" said Reginald, with a look which
riveted itself in the Baron's memory; " why,
then, we shall meet there; for I am going
to court, too! Tell my servant, somebody,
that there is no need to unpack. Going to
court .... tired of the country already?
Well, and what wonder? No one who sees you,
Helen (my dear, you are positively growing),
will wonder at your not being particularly fond
of being shut up—even" (there was a tone
which the Baron took note of) " in a . . . . in a
palace so splendid as Castle Oranienberg."

The air of the court-town was bad; it was an
ill-drained town; full of wide streets, and heavy
palaces, and rank gardens. The people were
bad. The Grand-Duke, a fool, had been
reclaimed by marrying for Grand-Duchess, a
woman to be greatly afraid of;—a bony, punctual
woman, who never laughed; a woman who
occupied her leisure and cultivated art, by stitching
an ugly pattern in gold thread upon a square
of velvet called a shrine-cloth; a woman who
encouraged high morals by keeping incessant
watch on her husband.

From the first moment of English Helen's
arrival, the Grand-Duchess hated her—and
accordingly covered her with distinguishing
attentions. " So different, ladies," said that sincere
and placable arbiter of virtue to her folk in
waiting, " from any woman trained in Germany!
As pure as a dewdrop."—Her eye grew purple
with bile and blood while she spoke of the
dewdrop in the Baron's hearing.

"And my wife can have wished for this!"
From the first moment, the Grand-Duke
lavished courtesies on Baron and Baroness: joining
enthusiastically in all praises and preferences
of English women for wives or companions—
in the hearing of the Grand-Duchess, and also
of the Baron.

"Was this, too, my wife's wish?"
The chime was for ever ringing in his head,
though hidden out of sight was the steel-
clasped book; hidden by old Stiegel, and
forgotten by him whose hand had filled its white
and grey pages. The court-service, however,
that he had to render was importunate.—
Irreverent though it seem to say so, the Grand-
Duke, I repeat, was a fool; a fool, too, during
one of those periods of crisis when Grand-
Duchies are in danger, by reason of vulgar
people rising up to ask inconvenient questions.
The Baron did not dislike a crisis, being born to
rule and to influence; thus, to prompt the Duke
with wisdom, and patience, and concession, and
liberality, and to make of the Duke's little kingdom
something happier and more prosperous
than a military jail or a poor-house, was no
distasteful task for the just, high-minded man—
upright enough to disregard vain-glory, and
patient with the inane creature, whom he swayed
for his good, without any will or purpose of his
own. " Ay, ay, you turn me round your
finger, I know," would the small potentate say,
when prompted to be honest against his will;
"but don't fancy it's your doing. It is all to
please your wife." A bad joke by the Grand-
Duchess treasured as a bad joke, and something
more, as she sate over her holy stitchery.

"My dear," said she to the Baroness, " you
know that Saint Prudentia's Day is drawing on,
and I have ten of these harps, and seven and a
half clusters of grapes to finish before the day
comes. While our husbands are busy with their
state affairs, you shall help me. You will learn
the stitch in a moment. I have never seen a
woman who is not a countrywoman of mine, that
has attracted me as you do. Baron, I am going
to take possession of your wife. We understand
one another already."

The young bride had not bargained for such
fervent and active sewing in a cause she cared
nothing for. But it was better, she presently
found, to be set up like one of Penelope's
maidens among the wooden ladies in the closet
of the Grand-Duchess, than to be left in her
own palace, with the Grand-Duke dropping in
at all hours: sometimes, with a message from
the Baron, when the latter was busy: sometimes,
with a rare flower, or a choice bird, or a piece
of music (though Helen was always hoarse now,
and had given up singing): for ever, with words
which she could not misinterpret, and with
looks she could even less mistake. She
remembered, however, the story of the Oranienberg
woman. She would be silent, strong, and resolute,
without giving her husband cause for a
moment's alarm, or embroiling him on her
account. So honestly believing the Grand-Duchess
to be an honest woman, she gave into the Grand-
Duchess's scheme, and wrought hard at the
harps and the bunches of grapes, hour after
hour.

The Grand-Duchess proved a strange com-
panion—so pryingly intimate, so coldly distant.
As the two stitched and stitched, she screwed
out of her needle-mate every particular of Helen's
mother's early death, of her father's subsequent
dissipation, of the hard profligacy of the woman
under whose fascinations he had fallen. She
screwed out of the candid and clear-hearted
English girl how narrowly she had escaped a
marriage with a cousin; how lonely she had been
at Schlettersheim (though she had gone to New
Years' balls there, with diamond hearts in her
shoe-roses)—her passionate delight at being