Annette was in the grand crucial position of English imaginative prose.  I recognize it, and that to this the streamlets flow, thence pours the flood.  But what was the plain truth?  She had brought herself to think she ought to sacrifice herself to Tinman, and her evasions with Herbert, manifested in tricks of coldness alternating with tones of regret, ended, as they had commenced, in a mysterious half-sullenness.  She had hardly a word to say.  Let me step in again to observe that she had at the moment no pointed intention of marrying Tinman.  To her mind the circumstances compelled her to embark on the idea of doing so, and she saw the extremity in an extreme distance, as those who are taking voyages may see death by drowning.  Still she had embarked.

“At all events, I have your word for it that you don’t dislike me?” said Herbert.

“Oh! no,” she sighed.  She liked him as emigrants the land they are leaving.

“And you have not promised your hand?”

“No,” she said, but sighed in thinking that if she could be induced to promise it, there would not be a word of leaving England.

“Then, as you are not engaged, and don’t hate me, I have a chance?” he said, in the semi-wailful interrogative of an organ making a mere windy conclusion.

Ocean sent up a tiny wave at their feet.

“A day like this in winter is rarer than a summer day,” Herbert resumed encouragingly.

Annette was replying, “People abuse our climate—­”

But the thought of having to go out away from this climate in the darkness of exile, with her father to suffer under it worse than herself, overwhelmed her, and fetched the reality of her sorrow in the form of Tinman swimming before her soul with the velocity of a telegraph-pole to the window of the flying train.  It was past as soon as seen, but it gave her a desperate sensation of speed.

She began to feel that this was life in earnest.

And Herbert should have been more resolute, fierier.  She needed a strong will.

But he was not on the rapids of the masterful passion.  For though going at a certain pace, it was by his own impulsion; and I am afraid I must, with many apologies, compare him to the skater—­to the skater on easy, slippery ice, be it understood; but he could perform gyrations as he went, and he rather sailed along than dashed; he was careful of his figuring.  Some lovers, right honest lovers, never get beyond this quaint skating-stage; and some ladies, a right goodly number in a foggy climate, deceived by their occasional runs ahead, take them for vessels on the very torrent of love.  Let them take them, and let the race continue.  Only we perceive that they are skating; they are careering over a smooth icy floor, and they can stop at a signal, with just half-a-yard of grating on the heel at the outside.  Ice, and not fire nor falling water, has been their medium of progression.

Whether a man should unveil his own sex is quite another question.  If we are detected, not solely are we done for, but our love-tales too.  However, there is not much ground for anxiety on that head.  Each member of the other party is blind on her own account.