Annette walked faster.

They descended from the shingle to the scant-bladed grass-sweep running
round the salted town-refuse on toward Elba. Van Diemen sniffed,
ejaculating, "I'll be best man with Mart Tinman about this business!
You'll stop with us, Mr.----what's your Christian name? Stop with us as
long as you like. Old friends for me! The joke of it is that Nelson
was my man, and yet I went and enlisted in the cavalry. If you talk of
chemical substances, old Mart Tinman was a sneak who never cared a dump
for his country; and I'm not to speak a single sybbarel about that.....
over there... Australia... Gippsland! So down he went, clean over. Very
sorry for what we have done. Contrite. Penitent."

"Now we feel the wind a little," said Annette.

Fellingham murmured, "Allow me; your shawl is flying loose."

He laid his hands on her arms, and, pressing her in a tremble, said,
"One sign! It's not true? A word! Do you hate me?"

"Thank you very much, but I am not cold," she replied and linked herself
to her father.

Van Diemen immediately shouted, "For we are jolly boys! for we are jolly
boys! It's the air on the champagne. And hang me," said he, as they
entered the grounds of Elba, "if I don't walk over my property."

Annette interposed; she stood like a reed in his way.

"No! my Lord! I'll see what I sold you for!" he cried. "I'm an owner of
the soil of Old England, and care no more for the title of squire than
Napoleon Bonaparty. But I'll tell you what, Mr. Hubbard: your mother
was never so astonished at her dog as old Van Diemen would be to hear
himself called squire in Old England. And a convict he was, for he
did wrong once, but he worked his redemption. And the smell of my
own property makes me feel my legs again. And I'll tell you what, Mr.
Hubbard, as Netty calls you when she speaks of you in private: Mart
Tinman's ideas of wine are pretty much like his ideas of healthy smells,
and when I'm bailiff of Crikswich, mind, he'll find two to one against
him in our town council. I love my country, but hang me if I don't
purify it--"

Saying this, with the excitement of a high resolve a upon him, Van
Diemen bored through a shrubbery-brake, and Fellingham said to Annette:

"Have I lost you?"

"I belong to my father," said she, contracting and disengaging her
feminine garments to step after him in the cold silver-spotted dusk of
the winter woods.

Van Diemen came out on a fish-pond.

"Here you are, young