telling her she was the bird of passage."

Clarendon lingered, melancholy and disillusioned, at his fine house in
Piccadilly until, impeached by Parliament, he remembered Strafford's
fate, and set out to tread once more and for the remainder of his days
the path of exile.

Time avenged him. Two of his granddaughters--Mary and Anne--reigned
successively as queens in England.

X. THE TRAGEDY OF HERRENHAUSEN

Count Philip Koenigsmark and the Princess Sophia Dorothea

He was accounted something of a scamp throughout Europe, and
particularly in England, where he had been associated with his brother
in the killing of Mr. Thynne. But the seventeenth century did not
look for excessively nice scruples in a soldier of fortune; and so it
condoned the lack of virtue in Count Philip Christof Koenigsmark for
the sake of his personal beauty, his elegance, his ready wit, and his
magnificent address. The court of Hanover made him warmly welcome,
counting itself the richer for his presence; whilst he, on his side, was
retained there by the Colonelcy in the Electoral Guard to which he
had been appointed, and by his deep and ill-starred affection for the
Princess Sophia Dorothea, the wife of the Electoral Prince, who later
was to reign in England as King George I.

His acquaintance with her dated back to childhood, for they had been
playmates at her father's ducal court of Zell, where Koenigsmark had been
brought up. With adolescence he had gone out into the world to seek the
broader education which it offered to men of quality and spirit. He had
fought bulls in Madrid, and the infidel overseas; he had wooed adventure
wherever it was to be met, until romance hung about him like an aura.
Thus Sophia met him again, a dazzling personality, whose effulgence
shone the more brightly against the dull background of that gross
Hanoverian court; an accomplished, graceful, self-reliant man of the
world, in whom she scarcely recognized her sometime playmate.

The change he found in her was no less marked, though of a different
kind. The sweet child he had known--she had been married in 1682, at
the age of sixteen--had come in her ten years of wedded life to the
fulfilment of the handsome promise of her maidenhood. But her beauty was
spiritualized by a certain wistfulness that had not been there before,
that should not have been there now had all been well. The sprightliness
inherent in her had not abated, but it had assumed a certa