As there was no appearance of Glaser wishing her to take the place of the deceased, Anna quitted his service for that of the Herr Justiz-Amptmann Grohmann, who was unmarried and only in his thirty-eighth year. He was in delicate health; thus she had every opportunity for studying to please him, by care, attention, and an affectionate regard for his comforts; but age was against her; her apparently unremitting attention won her no favour from Herr Grohmann, who received all his medicines from her own hands, and among them some dose, suggested by revenge, as he died on the 8th of May, 1809, "his disease being accompanied by violent internal pains of the stomach, dryness of the skin, _erbrechen_," &c. She acted her part so well, she appeared so inconsolable for his loss, and won among his friends a character so high and valuable as a careful and gentle sick-nurse, that she was almost immediately received into the household of the Kammer-Amptmann Gebhard, in that capacity. On the 13th of May, only five days after the death of Grohmann, Madame Gebhard was delivered of a baby. Both mother and child were doing well till the 16th, when the former was seized with precisely the same symptoms before named, and after seven days of agony--during which she frequently asserted that she had been poisoned--she expired. The funeral over, the widower found himself unable to manage his household and family, and not unnaturally thought he could not do better than retain in his service, for that purpose, Anna Schonleben, who had nursed his wife, as she had done his deceased friend, in their last hours; so she remained in his house invested with all the authority of _haushalterin_, though some of his friends hinted at the inexpediency of having as an inmate one whom some fatality seemed to attend. Gebhard laughed at this as superstitious; but there was one friend, in particular, who recurred to this matter again and again so pertinaciously--though upon what grounds he never precisely explained--that he came to the resolution of acting upon his advice, and to Anna he broke the subject of her impending dismissal, but as gently as possible, for she had acquired a certain ascendancy over him. She merely expressed her surprise and regret, and the subsequent day was fixed for her departure to Bayreuth; but prior to that event she resolved on a terrible revenge. She arranged all the rooms as usual, and filled the _salzfasten_ in the kitchen, saying the while, that "it was always the custom for those who left to fill it with salt for those who came in their place;" and when the droski for her conveyance came to the door, she took in her arms the infant child of Gebhard--the infant whose mother she had poisoned, and which was now five months old--and while feigning to caress it, she placed between "its boneless gums" a soft biscuit soaked in milk.