“It’s this, my dear Netty,” said Van Diemen, suffering her to lead him into her sitting-room; “we shall have to leave the shores of England.”

“Then we are ruined.”

“We’re not; the rascal can’t do that.  We might be off to the Continent, or we might go to America; we’ve money.  But we can’t stay here.  I’ll not live at any man’s mercy.”

“The Continent!  America!” exclaimed the enthusiast for England.  “Oh, papa, you love living in 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 you’re a young woman now, and you must help me to think of another cut and run, and what baggage we can scrape together in a jiffy, for I won’t live here at Mart Tinman’s mercy.”