'Any place in which we are perfectly happy is a place we glorify and transform,' says a writer: and in the joy of her engagement to Leslie Colville, notwithstanding the perils he had to face, Mary had glorified their pretty abode by the Elbe at Altona. That was all ended and over, and now the place had become to her one of double gloom, and associated with a double sorrow. 'Ah, Madame Deroubigne,' said the young Baron Rolandsburg, 'your charming villa has now not unnaturally become to you a place of calamitous associations--most unhomely,' he added. '_Ja-ja!_ it is always so after misfortunes come.' And now as Altona had become so repugnant--a place of such horror to both Mary Wellwood and Mrs. Deroubigne, the time was fast approaching when they were to take their departure for London. CHAPTER XII. THE PLOT THICKENS. Finding that his visits were fast making Ellinor seriously ill, Sir Redmond, at the request of Herr Wyburg, did not intrude upon her for a day or two, yet he called and left a sham message concerning his continued inquiries for Mrs. Deroubigne. 'Where are the friends of the Fraulein?' asked Herr Wyburg, twisting his coarse, red moustache; 'in England?' 'No, I rather think not,' replied Sir Redmond. 'Where, then?' 'They were in Altona last, I believe,' said the other, unguardedly. 'Altona! In Altona! _Ach Gott!_ Then she is the Fraulein for information concerning whom, alive or dead, such rewards were offered by placards in the Bourse and in the _Hamburger Nachtrichten_.' 'Nonsense,' said Sleath, discovering that the admission was a mistake. 'It is no nonsense,' exclaimed Wyburg, trying to remember the amount of the reward offered, his cupidity at once excited by the consideration whether or not it was worth his while to betray his employer. After the latter departed, he remembered the cunning and avaricious gleam that came into the watery grey eyes of the German, and a suspicion of his fidelity began to assume tangible shapes in the tainted mind of Sleath. The chances that after all his trouble, care, cunning, and expense she might be delivered from his snares, taken from his power, an exposé made, and doubtless an appeal to the police of the city, to the British consul and the four burgomasters, before his intrigue had been successfully developed and Ellinor's voice silenced, filled him with exasperation; and cursing his own imprudent admission to Herr Wyburg, into whose hands he had thus put himself, he drank so deeply at his hotel that night that, between his passion for Ellinor, and fierce suspicion of his German tools, his mind became inflamed to a dangerous degree, and he resolved that before the church bells tolled midnight he would visit the persecuted girl, for the purpose of making assurance doubly sure with her and his two paid creatures.