Ellinor was so painfully agitated that Sir Redmond was fain to resort to the most specious falsehoods to soothe and calm her; he promised most solemnly to write or telegraph to the British Ambassador at Brussels, to the postal authorities there, and so forth; and, with intense anger and mortification in his heart at his bad success, he left her to rejoin Dewsnap, and have a 'deep drink' at the Hotel Russie, and perhaps a turn into the Schweitzer Pavilion, feeling inclined on one hand--all inflamed as he was with her beauty and helplessness--to force her in some way to love him; and on the other, to sail away with his friend in the _Flying Foam_, and leave her to her fate in the hands of Herr Wyburg! He did neither for a day or two yet, but showered presents upon her; he ransacked the Neuer Wall and the Alster Wall for all kinds of pretty things, and bought up the best bouquets of the Vierlander flower-girls by the score; and Frau Wyburg only looked forward to the time when she could appropriate all the presents, when the girl was away or--dead. All his presents and pretty trifles, over which Lenchen went into ecstasies, remained, as he saw, untouched in their cases or packing paper. 'You disdain all these things which I feel such delight in offering you,' said he, reproachfully. She wrung her interlaced fingers, but made no reply. A red gleam shot out of Sleath's eyes; he bit his lip, and the Frau Wyburg laughed, while her black orbs glittered mischievously, and her mouth wore its cruel expression more unpleasantly than usual. But for his early entanglement with his mother's maid--Seraphina Fubsby, whose absurd name he loathed now--an event which too probably had warped his whole life, he felt at times--but at times only--that he would gladly have offered his hand and all he possessed to the sweet and gentle Ellinor; and, though he knew how she shrank from him, and loathed him, he could not help trying to play the old game he had begun at Birkwoodbrae, by urging again and again that his marriage was untrue, illegal, that he would prove it so, and also urging his wild, blind passion for herself, on the plea of her wonderful beauty, as Richard of England did his passion for the Lady Anne, having rarely found an appeal to a woman on _that_ score fail him. But he might as well have spoken to a statue now, and as she could extract no tidings of her sister or Mrs. Deroubigne from him, she thought only of escaping from the house of his odious friends. She was now aware that she had been entrapped by a specious story, and that neither Mary nor Mrs. Deroubigne would seem to have resided with them after leaving Altona, as Frau Wyburg and her husband, though 'coached' by Sleath and Gaiters, evidently knew nothing about them save their names, and a new dismay seized the unhappy girl.