He rang the bell.  Mrs. Tossell answered it, bringing with her a tray of cold meats, apple tart, syllabubs, glasses, and a flagon of home-made cider.  Yes, to be sure, they might have their horses saddled; but they might not go before observing Inistow’s full ritual of hospitality.

Miss Sally plied (as she put it) a good knife and fork, and the Parson was hungry as a hunter should be.  They ate, therefore, and talked little for a while:  there would be time for talk on the long homeward ride.  But when, in Homer’s words, they had put from them the desire of meat and drink, and had mounted and bidden Mrs. Tossell farewell, Parson Chichester reopened the conversation.

“You believe the child’s story, then?”

“Why, of course; and so must you.  Man alive, truth was written all over it!”

“Yes, yes; I was using a fashion of speech.  And the boy?”

“Is Miles Chandon’s son.  On that too you may lay all Lombard Street to a china orange.”  In the twilight Miss Sally leaned forward for a moment and smoothed her roan’s mane.  “You know the history, of course?”

“Very little of it.  I knew, to be sure, that somehow Chandon had made a mess of things—­turned unbeliever, and what not—­”

“Is that all?” Miss Sally, for all her surprise, appeared to be slightly relieved.  “But I was forgetting.  You’re an unmarried man:  a wife would have taught you the tale and a hundred guesses beside.  Of all women in the world, parsons’ wives are the most inquisitive.”

Mr. Chichester made no reply to this.  She glanced at him after a pause, and observed that he rode with set face and looked straight ahead between his horse’s ears.

“Forgive me,” she said.  “When folks come to our time of life without marrying, nine times out of ten there has been a mess; and what I said a moment since is just the flippant talk we use to cover it up.  By ’our time of life’ I don’t mean, of course, that we’re of an age, you and I, but that we’ve fixed our fate, formed our habits, made our beds and must lie in ’em as comfortably as we can manage. . . .  I was a girl when Miles Chandon came to grief; you were a grown man—­had been away for years, if I recollect, on some missionary expedition.”

“In north-east China.”

“To be sure, yes; and, no doubt, making the discovery that converting Chinamen was as hopeless a business as to forget Exmoor and the Quantocks.”

“I had put my hand to the plough—­”

“—­and God by an illness gently released it.  I have heard . . .  Well, to get back to Miles Chandon. . . .  He was young—­a second son, you’ll remember, and poor at that; a second lieutenant in the Navy, with no more than his pay and a trifling allowance.  The boy had good instincts,” said Miss Sally with a short, abrupt laugh.  “I may as well say at once that he wanted to marry me, but had been forced to dismiss the notion.”

Again she paused a moment before taking up the story.