Vita's days and nights had become one long nightmare of terror. The terror for herself had undermined all her confidence for her father, and in her lover's ability to succor. The hours of racking thought since learning the fate awaiting herself left her beautiful face drawn, and her spirit bowed and crushed. There was no hope anywhere. From the moment she had first recognized Frederick von Berger, a dreary hopelessness had set in, and now she knew that her worst apprehensions were to be more than fulfilled. She knew something of the machinery he controlled, and she knew how hopeless it was that Ruxton, with all his manhood and confidence, could ever hope to contend with it and defeat it. Her father, she knew, would be hunted down and--punished. While she--she must inevitably fall a victim of the sentence passed upon her here in this desolate, secret prison. The torture she endured was insupportable. Every moment of the day she was watched either by the hard-faced matron of the place, or by her own maid, Francella. She had railed at the latter for her cruel perfidy, she had appealed to the former. But in neither case had she elicited the smallest spark of sympathy. The matron had merely shrugged her broad shoulders. "You would sell our Fatherland to an enemy. You are not fit to live," she had said, with a coldness which none can display more effectively than a woman. In Francella she met only the heartless cruelty of a servant who finds it in her power to rend a late mistress. "Some day I take my children to the grave of the woman who would have betrayed our country, and I make them spit upon it." So Vita was left to nurse her terror in the awful solitude and silence of the splendid halls of this isolated mansion. How long she might have borne it and retained sanity is doubtful. It surely could not have been long. With the smallest gleam of sympathy it might have been possible to endure. But there was no sympathy. The gloom of her outlook from her windows, the awesome grandeur of her rooms, the cold antagonism of those who waited upon her as prison warders,--all these things aggravated her trouble, just as they were calculated to aggravate. Then in the very depths of her despairing misery there suddenly shone out a vague, flickering light of hope. It was no less than a stealthy and secret visit from Ludwig von Salzinger. It came in the night. Vita had abandoned sleeping at night fearing lest the murder would be committed during the hours of darkness. She had allowed her imagination to run riot till she almost came to fear her own shadow.