England so!"

"Not so much as all that, my dear. You do, that I know. But I don't see
how it's to be managed. Mart Tinman and I have been at tooth and claw
to-day and half the night; and he has thrown off the mask, or he's
dashed something from my sight, I don't know which. I knocked him down."

"Papa!"

"I picked him up."

"Oh," cried Annette, "has Mr. Tinman been hurt?"

"He called me a Deserter!"

Anisette shuddered.

She did not know what this thing was, but the name of it opened a
cabinet of horrors, and she touched her father timidly, to assure him of
her constant love, and a little to reassure herself of his substantial
identity.

"And I am one," Van Diemen made the confession at the pitch of his
voice. "I am a Deserter; I'm liable to be branded on the back. And it's
in Mart Tinman's power to have me marched away to-morrow morning in the
sight of Crikswich, and all I can say for myself, as a man and a Briton,
is, I did not desert before the enemy. That I swear I never would have
done. Death, if death's in front; but your poor mother was a handsome
woman, my child, and there--I could not go on living in barracks and
leaving her unprotected. I can't tell a young woman the tale. A hundred
pounds came on me for a legacy, as plump in my hands out of open
heaven, and your poor mother and I saw our chance; we consulted, and we
determined to risk it, and I got on board with her and you, and over the
seas we went, first to shipwreck, ultimately to fortune."

Van Diemen laughed miserably. "They noticed in the hunting-field here I
had a soldier-like seat. A soldier-like seat it'll be, with a brand
on it. I sha'n't be asked to take a soldier-like seat at any of their
tables again. I may at Mart Tinman's, out of pity, after I've undergone
my punishment. There's a year still to run out of the twenty of my term
of service due. He knows it; he's been reckoning; he has me. But the
worst cat-o'-nine-tails for me is the disgrace. To have myself pointed
at, 'There goes the Deserter' He was a private in the Carbineers, and
he deserted.' No one'll say, 'Ay, but he clung to the idea of his old
schoolmate when abroad, and came back loving him, and trusted him, and
was deceived."

Van Diemen produced a spasmodic cough with a blow on his chest. Anisette
was weeping.

"There, now go to bed," said he. "I wish you might have known no more
than you did of our flight when I got you on board the ship with your
poor mother; but y