He knocked more loudly again, but failed to elicit the slightest response. Then he heard the mocking laugh of Frau Wyburg, who was listening at the foot of the staircase, and, believing that already he was being deluded, a gust of fury seized him, and applying his foot to the door, and as it was old and worm-eaten, he dashed it open with ease, and entered the darkened room. It was empty, and no cry of alarm or consternation followed his furious irruption into it. The upheld candle showed him in a moment that its occupant was no longer there. Ellinor was gone! Her bed had been unslept in; her hat and the jacket she had got on board the _Flying Foam_ were lying on it. Where was she? Where hidden away? That double villain Wyburg had deceived him after all, was Sir Redmond's instant thought, and, impressed by the rewards offered in the _Hamburger Nachtrichten_ and elsewhere, had 'sold' him and given her up to Mrs. Deroubigne. Though infuriated with rage and disappointment he became sober in a moment, and turned to confront Wyburg and his wife; and, to do them justice, their astonishment, incredulity, and alarm had not the least appearance of being simulated, but were genuine. She was concealed from him perhaps in some other apartment. Frau Wyburg emphatically denied that she was. 'Silence, hag!' exclaimed Sir Redmond; 'had you lived three centuries ago, you would have been burned before the Rathhaus as a witch!' Her black eyes gleamed dangerously at this injurious remark, and on Sir Redmond turning away to prosecute a search elsewhere in defiance of the palpable evidence that the door had been locked on the inside, and that the key was still in the lock, Herr Wyburg, who was mad with consternation and drinking, roughly barred his way. On the second finger of his right hand Sir Redmond wore a cluster of diamonds; so prominent and sharp were they that they cut through his tightly-fitting kid glove. These brilliants, as he dealt Wyburg a facer, laid his cheek completely open and nearly tore his left eye out, thus a terrible and most unseemly brawl ensued. Wyburg was a man of enormous strength, and for whom the enervated baronet was no match in any way. Maddened by pain, the sight of his own blood flowing freely, by absinthe and _eau-de-vie_, inspirited by revenge and greed together, he resolved to make Sleath a victim now, and, though suffering from what the French call the _folie paralytique_ which the two compounds referred to produce, he was simply savage, yet methodical, in his proceedings. Rushing upon Sleath like an infuriated bull, he closed with him, and hurling him down the staircase flung him in a heap, bleeding and senseless, at the bottom. When he recovered, Sleath found himself, secured in an attic of Wyburg's house, a prisoner, bound securely with ropes, stiff, sore, and bruised, his face and shirt front all plastered with blood.