The fascinating arts of seduction having proved vain, they were followed by violence and ill-treatment; and when, after passing several months in ignorance of her fate, Lodowick of Homburg at length forced Count Donat’s fortress in search of his bride, he found her in a subterraneous cell, similar to that in which I was myself imprisoned. I heard the tumult occasioned by her deliverance, and doubted not that my own was at hand.—Alas! my hopes were vain! My feeble cries could not reach the hearing of my friends; they knew not that those caverns contained any captive except Minna. Mellusina managed to persuade my adopted daughter and her deliverer, that I had paid the debt of Nature. They shed unavailing tears upon the grave, which the deceiver pointed out to them as mine, while buried alive beneath the castle’s foundations I shrieked to them for help in vain; and I sank from the height of my deceived hopes into the deepest despair, till time and faith in God at length restored me to composure. The only effect resulting to myself from Minna’s deliverance was, that the strictness of my imprisonment was increased. The Count of Homburg’s desperate enterprize could only have succeeded, while Donat was absent; and the latter now seldom left the Castle, lest similar accidents should occur. They say, that the fires of the infernal regions burn doubly fierce, when their monarch returns from his wanderings on earth; such too was the case in the Castle of Sargans—When their tyrant breathed the same air with them, the chains of the poor captives were rendered doubly heavy, and their sufferings doubly sharp! Yet was he not permitted to kill me, since Heaven had decreed, that I should at last see the moment of deliverance. Adelaide still maintained, that I was in existence; imperial majesty interfered in my behalf, and insisted on Donat’s producing proofs of my death. My tyrant became embarrassed, and at length proposed to me that my liberty should be restored, provided I would voluntarily make over the whole of my possessions (which descended to me in right of my uncle) to the man, who had so long unlawfully possessed them. I joyfully embraced the offer. I had long considered liberty as the only real wealth; I had long harboured no other wish than to end my wretched life in the repose and security of a cloister!