One evening, in the moonlight, the duchess saw him climb a garden wall, with a lute in his hand, then the sky became overcast, and she could distinguish him no more; she could only see a lighted window where a beautiful girl was standing.  The maiden charmed her beyond measure, and she grew hot and cold with the pleasurable anticipation that George might win her for his wife some day and bring her home.  But then she reflected that he was a child born to ill-luck, and as such would never be blessed with the love of so exquisite a creature.

What she saw in the next few weeks confirmed this opinion.  His manner was usually decisive, abrupt and self-reliant, but now he seemed to her like a clock that points to one hour while it strikes another.  At the works he gave his orders as firmly and decidedly as ever; but as soon as he was alone, he looked like a criminal sentenced to death, and either sat bowed down and miserable or else paced up and down the floor restlessly, gesticulating wildly.  Often when he beat his forehead with the palm of his hand or struck his breast with his fist, his mother was frightened.

Once, after a garden party, where he had been fortunate enough to walk alone for a full hour under a shady pergola with the daughter of the gentleman who owned the building in progress, and to kiss her hand many times, he burst into tears as soon as he was in his own room, and behaved so wildly that his mother feared for his reason and wept bitterly also. just at this time she ought to have felt nothing but joy, joy, heart-felt and unadulterated, for it appeared that the chief of the councillors had in truth been more far-sighted, than other people and had not made a mistake in his choice of a queen, for she had just borne a son, and, moreover, one that was a true Greylock.  His grey lock was indeed somewhat thin and lacked the firm curl of the former ones; but every one who was not colour-blind must acknowledge that it was grey.

The duchess would have liked to rejoice sincerely in her grandchild, but her affections were divided, and even when she held it in her arms, she yearned for the magic glass and a sight of her unlucky son.

Wendelin XVI., who had long been satiated with the pleasures which his position offered him, finding them all flat and insipid, experienced for the first time in twelve years a sensation of delight, like any one else, when he heard the faint cry of the infant and learned the good news that his child was a son.  Hitherto his greatest satisfaction had been to hear the clock strike five when he had imagined that it was only four.

The child, however, was something entirely new, and his heart, which usually beat as slowly as a clock that is running down, quickened its pulsations whenever he thought of his son.  During the first weeks of its life he sat for hours at a time beside the gilt cradle, staring thoughtfully through his eye-glass at the future Wendelin XVII.  Soon this occupation ceased to interest him, and he drifted along once more on the sluggish waves of his former existence, from minute to minute, from hour to hour.