I paid no regard, but continued to divert myself.

She returned to the charge half an hour after: 'Will you end, then!' said she with a vexed air: 'you are so engaged, you have eyes for nothing.'-- 'You are in such a humor,' I replied, 'that I know not what to make of it.'-- 'Look at the Queen, then, Madam; and you will cease to reproach me!' A glance which I gave that way filled me with terror.

There sat the Queen, paler than death, in a corner of the room, in low conference with Sonsfeld and Countess Finkenstein.

As my Brother was most in my anxieties, I asked, If it concerned him?
Bulow shrugged her shoulders, answering, 'I don't know at all!' A moment after, the Queen gave Good-night; and got into her carriage with me,--speaking no word all the way to the Schloss; so that I thought my Brother must be dead, and I myself took violent palpitations, and Sonsfeld, contrary to orders, had at last to tell me in the course of the night." Poor Wilhelmina, and poor Mother of Wilhelmina! The fact, of Arrest, and unknown mischief to the Prince, is taken for certain; but what may be the issues of it; who besides the Prince have been involved in it, especially who will be found to have been involved, is matter of dire guess to the three who are most interested here.
Lieutenant Katte finds he ought to dispose of the Prince's effects which were intrusted to him; of the thousand gold Thalers in particular, and, beyond and before all, of the locked Writing-desk, in which lies the Prince's correspondence, the very Queen and Princess likely to be concerned in it! Katte despatches these two objects, the Money and the little Desk, in all secrecy, to Madam Finkenstein, as to the surest hand, with a short Note shadowing out what he thinks they are: Countess Finkenstein, old General von Finkenstein's Wife, and a second mother to the Prince, she, like her Husband, a sworn partisan of the Prince and his Mother, shall do with these precious and terrible objects what, to her own wise judgment, seems best.
Madam Finkenstein carries them at once, in deep silence, to the Queen.
Huge dismay on the part of the Queen and Princess.

They know too well what Letters may be there: and there is a seal on the Desk, and no key to it; neither must it, in time coming, seem to have been opened, even if we could now open it.