“I wish I could see one--of a real English oak,” said Annette.
“And after being in England a few months you will be sighing for the Continent.”
“You think you will be quite contented here?”
“I am sure I shall be. May papa and I never be exiles again! I did not feel it when I was three years old, going out to Australia; but it would be like death to me now. Oh!” Annette shivered, as with the exile’s chill.
“On my honour,” said Mr. Fellingham, as softly as he could with the wind in his teeth, “I love the old country ten times more from your love of it.”
“That is not how I want England to be loved,” returned Annette.
He should have seen that the way to woo her was to humour her prepossession by another passion. He could feel that it ennobled her in the abstract, but a latent spite at Tinman on account of his wine, to which he continued angrily to attribute as unwonted dizziness of the head and slight irascibility, made him urgent in his desire that she should separate herself from Tinman and his sister by the sharp division of derision.
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.