Frightened into listening to him and being utterly depressed by my existence I allowed myself to be convinced. I did not want to go out. For several days I lived in anguish, oppression and uncertainty. I could not sleep. When I reflected, I did not know what to think and what to believe. Suffering upon suffering overwhelmed me. Nobody can conceive the will-power necessary to preserve a certain amount of lucidity when one lives for years among lunatics. The haunting terror is such that if you have not the strength to detach yourself from your surroundings you must inevitably succumb. But God permitted me to escape in spirit and to rejoin my hoped-for rescuer. I ended by pulling myself together and I again asked to go out. They dared not refuse. However, I was still somewhat impressed by what I had heard, and I dared not go as far into the forest as formerly. And if I saw one or more cyclists I was afraid, although I said nothing. Had they come to attack me? I wondered. Had they, perhaps, come to rescue me? What a power is imagination! The cyclists were only harmless people quietly going about their business. My doctor-professor had not forgotten his promise. His intervention obtained the desired effect, and it was decreed that I should go to Bad-Elster in Bavaria. This place is in the mountains about a quarter of an hour's drive from the German frontier. If I escaped Charybdis I should encounter Scylla! The country is wild and the spa deserves to attract a cosmopolitan _clientèle_. But its fame, which is purely German, reassured my jailers. No one would look for me in this modest Bavarian Wiesbaden. And if, peradventure, my defender should arrive, he would find all the avenues to escape well guarded. In fact, the hotel at which I arrived with my suite of police officials, male and female, was immediately surrounded, according to the rules of the profession, by a cordon of sentries and inspectors. If any unknown or suspicious person approached he was followed, observed, and promptly identified. The count took care not to show himself, although, through information which he had procured at Koswig, he was not slow to learn that I had left for Bad-Elster. The police notified nothing out of the way to my keepers. Personally I was, as usual, neither impatient nor excited. My "lady-in-waiting" could not deny my affability. But within myself I felt that deliverance was at hand. This intuition was promptly confirmed. One day, when I was playing tennis, I noticed a fat man whose gait, hat and clothes pronounced him to be an Austrian. His eyes met mine in a very curious manner, but he saluted me respectfully. I could have sworn that his look heralded the coming of the count. I was not deceived. A little later, when I was coming out of the dining-room of the hotel, preceded by the doctor attached to my person, and followed by my "lady-in-waiting," a fair man brushed past me and whispered: "Listen! Someone is working for you."