All was in vain; he became
more and more cruelly involved, and found his honour lost at the same
moment with his fortune. About this period Northmour had been courting
his daughter with great assiduity, though with small encouragement; and
to him, knowing him thus disposed in his favour, Bernard Huddlestone
turned for help in his extremity. It was not merely ruin and dishonour,
nor merely a legal condemnation, that the unhappy man had brought upon
his head. It seems he could have gone to prison with a light heart. What
he feared, what kept him awake at night or recalled him from slumber
into frenzy, was some secret, sudden, and unlawful attempt upon his
life. Hence he desired to bury his existence and escape to one of the
islands in the South Pacific, and it was in Northmour's yacht, the _Red
Earl_, that he designed to go. The yacht picked them up clandestinely
upon the coast of Wales, and had once more deposited them at Graden,
till she could be refitted and provisioned for the longer voyage. Nor
could Clara doubt that her hand had been stipulated as the price of
passage. For, although Northmour was neither unkind nor even
discourteous, he had shown himself in several instances somewhat
over-bold in speech and manner.

I listened, I need not say, with fixed attention, and put many questions
as to the more mysterious part. It was in vain. She had no clear idea of
what the blow was, nor of how it was expected to fall. Her father's
alarm was unfeigned and physically prostrating, and he had thought more
than once of making an unconditional surrender to the police. But the
scheme was finally abandoned, for he was convinced that not even the
strength of our English prisons could shelter him from his pursuers. He
had had many affairs with Italy, and with Italians resident in London,
in the later years of his business, and these last, as Clara fancied,
were somehow connected with the doom that threatened him. He had shown
great terror at the presence of an Italian seaman on board the _Red
Earl_, and had bitterly and repeatedly accused Northmour in consequence.
The latter had protested that Beppo (that was the seaman's name) was a
capital fellow, and could be trusted to the death; but Mr. Huddlestone
had continued ever since to declare that all was lost, that it was only
a question of days, and that Beppo would be the ruin of him yet.

I regarded the whole story as the hallucination of a mind shaken by
calamity. He had suffer