This nurse, Rosy, was the foster-sister and confidante of Frau von Heydeck, and had contrived the entire scheme. It was by her advice that the marriage with Herr von Heydeck had been contracted, and to her keeping was entrusted the document whereby Heydeck bound himself to acknowledge the child as his own. With this in her possession she ruled her master with a rod of iron after his wife's death. Dr. Putzer, on his first visit at the castle, easily comprehended the relations between the castle's lord and the pretty waiting-maid. The young physician was taken with her handsome face and pert coquettish ways, while her by no means spotless past was of no consequence in his eyes. Loaded down with debts he had but one wish, and that was to secure for himself a comfortable and assured existence; the safest way to attain this end was by a marriage with Rosy; together they could gain such an ascendency over Herr von Heydeck as to induce him to share his wealth with them. They were soon agreed, and Heydeck weakly yielded to their mischievous influence. Rosy suggested to him that the boy's death would be the best luck that could befall him; but Heydeck, although scarcely too conscientious, was too cowardly to commit so grave a crime as murder. He consented to rid himself of the boy, but not by death; he would cause the intelligence of his death to be spread abroad, and he would bring him up in secret, until death did actually come, as he hoped it soon would, to the weakly, sickly child. The doctor and his betrothed lent Heydeck their ready aid; the doctor wrote the official certificate of the child's death,--he had spread the report of its fatal contagious disease that no one might desire to see the corpse,--and he fitted up the basement of the tower, whither the unfortunate child was taken and committed to the care of the two half-idiotic Melchers. The scheme which had been hatched in Rosy's brain was successful: the mock funeral took place, the boy vanished, and Herr von Heydeck was his heir. He paid the doctor and Rosy well for their services, and upon their immediate marriage hoped he was rid of them. Here however he was mistaken; his crime did not go unpunished, for he never was able to shake off the mastery maintained over him by the intriguing Rosy, not even when he secretly conveyed the boy away from the castle and falsely told the doctor that the child had died in Switzerland. Whenever Rosy wanted to extort money from Heydeck she threatened him with betrayal, not of the mock death of the child, in which crime she herself was an accomplice, but of that first deception of Heydeck's, whereby he had made official announcement of the birth of a child, who was in reality already more than a year old.