'You remember that cad, Colville of the Guards?' said Sleath, viciously.
'I have heard of him,' replied Dewsnap, evasively. 'Well?'
'He trumped up a story about this girl being a cousin of his to keep her, and her sister too, by Jove, to himself—a fact, Dolly; told me in London they were his cousins, though he never said so when we were at Dunkeld's place in Scotland. But now he has gone to Cabul, and the devil go with him!'
'What are we to do if the Vierlander woman won't remain on board after the fog lifts?' asked the sailing-master, Ringbolt.
'In that case we should have little difficulty in getting a sharp girl to attend, or, better still, some knowing and suggestive elderly party,' said Sleath.
'All right, sir—one has not far to look in Hamburg for what you want.'
'Dash it all!' exclaimed Dewsnap, who was fast becoming rather inebriated (this was not precisely what he said, but it looks milder in print). 'This girl of yours, Sleath, is likely to give us a deal of bother.'
'Not at all. I shall soon find a way to put an end to her nonsense,' growled Sir Redmond.
Like the latter, Dewsnap always suspected everybody until he knew they were innocent, and, if innocent, he deemed them fools. Thus he never doubted in his mind that the apparent repugnance of Ellinor was all coyness and affectation.
Mr. Adolphus Dewsnap, son of the late Alderman Sir Jephson Dewsnap, Knight, a soap-boiler in Bow, where he made a colossal fortune, was a fool and a cad of the first water, who looked up to Sleath, having a title, as one of 'the upper ten,' though Sleath's father had been, like the said alderman, a boy of the Foundling Hospital, from whence perhaps emanate many of the grotesque names we find in London.