The snares that had been laid for her, the loyal heart she had lost and now believed to be cold in the grave--all came before the girl with painful vividness, and she loathed herself for ever having listened, as she had done at Birkwoodbrae, to the artful wretch who from first to last had sought to lure her to destruction by so many specious falsehoods; for, in many ways, the baronet had now become so degraded in character that, so far as truth went, he was like the man mentioned by Mark Twain, who had such a sacred regard for truth that he never by any chance used it. Sooth, however, to say, prudence and weariness at times suggested to Sir Redmond the abandonment of his enterprise and designs regarding Ellinor; at other times, obstinacy, distorted pride, and, more than all, inflamed passions and her apparent helplessness, spurred him on in his schemes. He felt now that, if these were unsuccessful, they could only be relinquished at peril and _exposé_ to himself. Her inertia provoked and alarmed him. He would have preferred some of her former desperate energy, even though accompanied by undisguised repugnance of himself. He knew that now, with Mary Wellwood, the luckless Ellinor must be numbered with the dead; the last despairing advertisements he had seen in the _Hamburger Nachrichten_ and other journals led him to infer that such must be the case, and that the sorrowing sister had no doubt left Altona in a state of grief, for which he cared not a jot. He knew also that Ellinor was ignorant of Mary's precise whereabouts, whether she was still in Altona or had gone back to London or Birkwoodbrae; that she could not communicate with her, even by letter, save through him, and was thus completely in his power, as a baby or a bauble might have been; and he vaguely thought that if he could get her away, on any pretence, to Brussels or some quiet little village in the Netherlands, she would be still more so, and for the contingencies of the future he drew heavily on his bankers through Herr Burger, in the Gras Keller. For the future--let the future take care of itself! He had broken with English society, if not with the police. Who was there, as a relation, to call him to account, and who had the right to do so? he asked of himself. As he was not without fears or suspicions of his friend Mr. Adolphus Dewsnap, he resolved to get her away from the yacht. 'Tears--always tears!' said he, angrily, on the day after the _Flying Foam_ was moored alongside the jetty in the Binnenhafen. 'I daresay, like your sister, you are sorry for that fellow Colville--your "cousin" as he called himself--a good joke that! Very terrible, of course--cut off by the Cabul niggers, and so forth; but we can only die once. Hope he was duly prepared, as the devil-dodgers say, and all that sort of thing.' In furtherance of his plan to get her away from the yacht, he said, quite deliberately, 'Your friend Mrs. Deroubigne has left Altona.'