To Annette the figuring of Herbert was graceful, but it did not catch her up and carry her; it hardly touched her:  He spoke well enough to make her sorry for him, and not warmly enough to make her forget her sorrow for herself.

Herbert could obtain no explanation of the singularity of her conduct from Annette, and he went straight to her father, who was nearly as inexplicable for a time.  At last he said: 

“If you are ready to quit the country with us, you may have my consent.”

“Why quit the country?” Herbert asked, in natural amazement.

Van Diemen declined to tell him.

But seeing the young man look stupefied and wretched he took a turn about the room, and said:  “I have n’t robbed,” and after more turns, “I have n’t murdered.”  He growled in his menagerie trot within the four walls.  “But I’m, in a man’s power.  Will that satisfy you?  You’ll tell me, because I’m rich, to snap my fingers.  I can’t.  I’ve got feelings.  I’m in his power to hurt me and disgrace me.  It’s the disgrace—­to my disgrace I say it—­I dread most.  You’d be up to my reason if you had ever served in a regiment.  I mean, discipline—­if ever you’d known discipline—­in the police if you like—­anything—­anywhere where there’s what we used to call spiny de cor.  I mean, at school.  And I’m,” said Van Diemen, “a rank idiot double D. dolt, and flat as a pancake, and transparent as a pane of glass.  You see through me.  Anybody could.  I can’t talk of my botheration without betraying myself.  What good am I among you sharp fellows in England?”

Language of this kind, by virtue of its unintelligibility, set Mr. Herbert Fellingham’s acute speculations at work.  He was obliged to lean on Van Diemen’s assertion, that he had not robbed and had not murdered, to be comforted by the belief that he was not once a notorious bushranger, or a defaulting manager of mines, or any other thing that is naughtily Australian and kangarooly.

He sat at the dinner-table at Elba, eating like the rest of mankind, and looking like a starved beggarman all the while.

Annette, in pity of his bewilderment, would have had her father take him into their confidence.  She suggested it covertly, and next she spoke of it to him as a prudent measure, seeing that Mr. Fellingham might find out his exact degree of liability.  Van Diemen shouted; he betrayed himself in his weakness as she could not have imagined him.  He was ready to go, he said—­go on the spot, give up Elba, fly from Old England:  what he could not do was to let his countrymen know what he was, and live among them afterwards.  He declared that the fact had eternally been present to his mind, devouring him; and Annette remembered his kindness to the artillerymen posted along the shore westward of Crikswich, though she could recall no sign of remorse.  Van Diemen said:  “We have to do with Martin Tinman; that’s one who has a hold on me, and one’s enough.  Leak out my secret to a second fellow, you double my risks.”  He would not be taught to see how the second might counteract the first.  The singularity of the action of his character on her position was, that though she knew not a soul to whom she could unburden her wretchedness, and stood far more isolated than in her Australian home, fever and chill struck her blood in contemplation of the necessity of quitting England.