Drying her eyes to weep again, Annette said, when she could speak:  “Will nothing quiet him?  I was going to bother you with all sorts of silly questions, poor dear papa; but I see I can understand if I try.  Will nothing—­Is he so very angry?  Can we not do something to pacify him?  He is fond of money.  He—­oh, the thought of leaving England!  Papa, it will kill you; you set your whole heart on England.  We could—­I could—­could I not, do you not think?—­step between you as a peacemaker.  Mr. Tinman is always very courteous to me.”

At these words of Annette’s, Van Diemen burst into a short snap of savage laughter.  “But that’s far away in the background, Mr. Mart Tinman!” he said.  “You stick to your game, I know that; but you’ll find me flown, though I leave a name to stink like your common behind me.  And,” he added, as a chill reminder, “that name the name of my benefactor.  Poor old Van Diemen!  He thought it a safe bequest to make.”

“It was; it is!  We will stay; we will not be exiled,” said Annette.  “I will do anything.  What was the quarrel about, papa?”

“The fact is, my dear, I just wanted to show him—­and take down his pride—­I’m by my Australian education a shrewder hand than his old country.  I bought the house on the beach while he was chaffering, and then I sold it him at a rise when the town was looking up—­only to make him see.  Then he burst up about something I said of Australia.  I will have the common clean.  Let him live at the Crouch as my tenant if he finds the house on the beach in danger.”

“Papa, I am sure,” Annette repeated—­“sure I have influence with Mr. Tinman.”

“There are those lips of yours shutting tight,” said her father.  “Just listen, and they make a big O. The donkey!  He owns you’ve got influence, and he offers he’ll be silent if you’ll pledge your word to marry him.  I’m not sure he didn’t say, within the year.  I told him to look sharp not to be knocked down again.  Mart Tinman for my son-in-law!  That’s an upside down of my expectations, as good as being at the antipodes without a second voyage back!  I let him know you were engaged.”

Annette gazed at her father open-mouthed, as he had predicted; now with a little chilly dimple at one corner of the mouth, now at another—­as a breeze curves the leaden winter lake here and there.  She could not get his meaning into her sight, and she sought, by looking hard, to understand it better; much as when some solitary maiden lady, passing into her bedchamber in the hours of darkness, beholds—­tradition telling us she has absolutely beheld foot of burglar under bed; and lo! she stares, and, cunningly to moderate her horror, doubts, yet cannot but believe that there is a leg, and a trunk, and a head, and two terrible arms, bearing pistols, to follow.  Sick, she palpitates; she compresses her trepidation; she coughs, perchance she sings a bar or two of an aria.  Glancing down again, thrice horrible to her is it to discover that there is no foot!  For had it remained, it might have been imagined a harmless, empty boot.  But the withdrawal has a deadly significance of animal life. . . .