'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.
'Yes,' he hiccupped, with an oath, as he was taken in a droski across the Adolphs-brucke and the Nuerwall, 'I'll end it all, or know the reason why! I have played the whining fool too long. Am I to pass my days in slaving to study her whim-whams?—to overcome her prudery and sham scruples? Am I a fool or a boy? Of what or of whom am I afraid? I will now listen only to the dictates of my own mind.'
He muttered much more to the same purpose aloud, and, quitting the droski at the corner of the Grosse Bleichen, thrust a double-mark into the driver's hand, and, without thinking of change, proceeded on foot to the house of Herr Wyburg.