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 the detective, perhaps.  He cast it altogether on Tinman that Annette’s complexion of character had become discoloured to his mind; for, in spite of the physical freshness with which he returned to her society, he was incapable of throwing off the idea of her being commonplace; and it was with regret that he acknowledged he had gained from his walk only a higher opinion of himself.

Her father was the victim of a sick headache, [Migraine—­D.W.]and lay, a groaning man, on his bed, ministered to by Mrs. Crickledon chiefly.  Annette had to conduct the business with Mr. Phippun and Mr. Tinman as to payment for the chiwal-glass.  She was commissioned to offer half the price for the glass on her father’s part; more he would not pay.  Tinman and Phippun sat with her in Crickledon’s cottage, and Mrs. Crickledon brought down two messages from her invalid, each positive, to the effect that he would fight with all the arms of English law rather than yield his point.

Tinman declared it to be quite out of the question that he should pay a penny.  Phippun vowed that from one or the other of them he would have the money.

Annette naturally was in deep distress, and Fellingham postponed the discussion to the morrow.

Even after such a taste of Tinman as that, Annette could not be induced to join in deriding him privately.  She looked pained by Mr. Fellingham’s cruel jests.  It was monstrous, Fellingham considered, that he should draw on himself a second reprimand from Van Diemen Smith, while they were consulting in entire agreement upon the case of the chiwal-glass.