whispered back, and her hand fell on his shoulder.
His hand sought hers, he caught it and kissed it with a sort of piety.

'I love you.' He spoke the words like a prayer. She drew away from him.

'Monseigneur,' she said, 'I thought you had forgotten me!' He started at
her gesture of repulsion and at the formal word.

'You are a woman no man can forget,' he answered. Then he told her how
that evening in the castle garden he had known he loved her; how he had
dreaded giving himself up to a passion which he divined would prove so
absorbing as to turn him from his cherished military ambition. He poured
out to her his life's history, all his dreams of brilliant feats of arms,
the raising of his duchy to a kingdom; he told her of his bitter
disappointment when he found these ambitions were incomprehensible to the
Duchess Johanna Elizabetha; of how, gradually, he had awakened to the
fact that he was tied to a woman who utterly lacked in sympathy, and thus
wearied him and drove him to seek consolation and amusement in the light
loves and fancies of court gallantry, and then how each lady's charms had
palled inevitably.

'And now,' he paused, 'now I feel that all my life began when first I
heard your voice! I have been fighting with my thoughts ever since.
Beloved! I have nothing to offer you--you are too pure to take the only
position I could give you--and I love you too well to ask you.'

She looked at him, and a smile touched her lips and vanished almost
before it was born.

'Mon poete,' she whispered, and stretched out both hands to him; he took
them in his, and drew her towards him. One thick curl of hair had fallen
forward on her neck, he lifted it and buried his face in it, kissing it
wildly, breathing in its fragrance.

'I love you,' he said again, and drew her, unresisting, into his arms.
'Philomele! Ah!' and his lips met hers.

Overhead a bird burst forth into a rhapsody of song.

CHAPTER VII

THE FULFILMENT

NOW began for Wilhelmine a time of strangely mixed and contending
emotions. She loved Eberhard Ludwig with all that fervour and lavish
freshness which we give to our first love; she longed to surrender to his
passion, yet she held back with a modesty of maidenly reserve which her
many jealous enemies ascribed to calculation, or else entirely denied,
alleging that she was a mere adventuress plying her illicit trade
according to her habit. Of a truth, there may have been a shade of
strategy in