t."

"Never!"

"You think you will be quite contented here?"

"I am sure I shall be. May papa and I never be exiles again! I did not
feel it when I was three years old, going out to Australia; but it would
be like death to me now. Oh!" Annette shivered, as with the exile's
chill.

"On my honour," said Mr. Fellingham, as softly as he could with the wind
in his teeth, "I love the old country ten times more from your love of
it."

"That is not how I want England to be loved," returned Annette.

"The love is in your hands."

She seemed indifferent on hearing it.

He should have seen that the way to woo her was to humour her
prepossession by another passion. He could feel that it ennobled her in
the abstract, but a latent spite at Tinman on account of his wine, to
which he continued angrily to attribute as unwonted dizziness of the
head and slight irascibility, made him urgent in his desire that she
should separate herself from Tinman and his sister by the sharp division
of derision.

Annette declined to laugh at the most risible caricatures of Tinman. In
her antagonism she forced her simplicity so far as to say that she did
not think him absurd. And supposing Mr. Tinman to have proposed to the
titled widow, Lady Ray, as she had heard, and to other ladies young and
middle-aged in the neighbourhood, why should he not, if he wished to
marry? If he was economical, surely he had a right to manage his own
affairs. Her dread was lest Mr. Tinman and her father should quarrel
over the payment for the broken chiwal-glass: that she honestly
admitted, and Fellingham was so indiscreet as to roar aloud, not so very
cordially.

Annette thought him unkindly satirical; and his thoughts of her reduced
her to the condition of a commonplace girl with expressive eyes.

She had to return to her father. Mr. Fellingham took a walk on the
springy turf along the cliffs; and "certainly she is a commonplace
girl," he began by reflecting; with a side eye at the fact that his
meditations were excited by Tinman's poisoning of his bile. "A girl
who can't see the absurdity of Tinman must be destitute of common
intelligence." After a while he sniffed the fine sharp air of mingled
earth and sea delightedly, and he strode back to the town late in the
afternoon, laughing at himself in scorn of his wretched susceptibility
to bilious impressions, and really all but hating Tinman as the cause
of his weakness--in the manner of the criminal hating th