The poor sufferer was conveyed to one of those dungeons, with which you, unfortunate Urania, are but too well acquainted; Dungeons, whose massy walls had rendered them impenetrable to the flames, which had laid all above them in ruins. But what fortress is so strong, what abyss of the earth is so deep, that its approach is inaccessible to the generous activity of friendship? Gertrude had no sooner clasped in her arms the poor ill-treated babe, than she lost not a moment before she quitted the Castle, and fled with him to implore the honest inhabitants of the vale to afford their assistance to his unfortunate mother. As more than half the attendants of the barbarous Queen of Hungary disapproved of her late treatment of the wretched and the helpless, and were favourable to the cause of opprest innocence, Gertrude met with but little difficulty (when she secretly returned to Ravenstein) in gaining admission to the dungeon of her friend: but she found the unfortunate in a situation, which made her escape almost impracticable—the Queen had that morning condescended to enter her cell, possibly thinking that it was right to fulfill one of the most sacred duties of her faith, the visiting the prisoner: but what she brought with her was not, according to the divine precept, hope and consolation. No; much rather was it her business to heap on the head of her heart-broken captive an additional weight of motives for affliction. An animated picture of the enormity of Rodolpho’s crimes, and an horrible enumeration of the tortures to which his sentence condemned him, nearly robbed the wretched Adelaide of her senses; and she only retained recollection sufficient to feel the last stab inflicted by her tormentor, when the unfeeling woman named the day, on which Rodolpho was to suffer. Well did she hear that cruel word, and that moment of horror inscribed itself on her bewildered brain in characters of fire. Gertrude, when she hastened to her friend’s bedside, could not help fancying that she already embraced her corse: her feelings had been strained beyond their utmost boundaries, and were followed by a total cessation of her powers both of body and of mind.