“Woman comes to man, I believe, not man to woman,” he said.

“That is so,” she admitted with a touch of colour in her cheeks at his attitude, “but you must think all round it—­which you haven’t done yet, seemingly.”

Then Richard laughed—­too late; for a laugh may lose all its value if the right moment be missed.

“Where’s the fun?” she asked.  “I thought, of course, that you’d be business-like as well as lover-like and would see ‘The Seven Stars’ had got more to it than ‘The Tiger.’”

Even now the situation might have been saved.  The very immensity of her claim rendered it ridiculous; but Richard was too astonished to guess an utterance so hyperbolic had been made to offer him an easy victory.

“You thought that, Nelly?  ‘The Seven Stars’ more to it than ’The Tiger’?”

“Surely!”

“Because you get a few tea-parties and old women at nine-pence a head on your little bit of grass?”

A counter so terrific destroyed the last glimmering hope of a peaceful situation, and Mrs. Northover perceived this first.

“It’s war then?” she said.  “So perhaps you’ll tell me what you mean by my little bit of grass.  Not the finest pleasure gardens in Bridport, I suppose?”

“Be damned if this ain’t the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,” he answered.

“You never was one to see a joke, we all know; and if that’s the funniest thing you ever heard, you ain’t heard many.  And you’ll forgive me, please, if I tell you there’s nothing funny in my speaking about my pleasure gardens, though it does sound a bit funny to hear ’em called ’a bit of grass’ by a man that’s got nothing but a few apple trees, past bearing, and a strip of potatoes and weeds, and a fowl-run.  But, as you’ve got no use for a garden, perhaps you’ll remember the inn yard, and how many hosses you can put up, and how many I can.”

“It’s the number of hosses that comes—­not the number you put up,” he answered; “and if you want to tell me you’ve often obliged with a spare space in your yard, perhaps I may remind you that you generally got quite as good as you gave.  But be that as it will, the point lies in one simple question, and I ask you if you really thought, as a woman nearer sixty than fifty and with credit for sense, that I was going to chuck ‘The Tiger’ and coming over to your shop.  Did you really think that?”

Not for an instant had she thought it; but the time was inappropriate for saying so.  She might have confessed the truth in the past; she might confess the truth in the future; she was not going to do so at present.  He should have a stab for his stab.

“You’ve often told me I was the sensiblest woman in Dorset, Richard, and being that, I naturally thought you’d drop your bar-loafers’ place and come over to me—­and glad to come.”

“Good God!” he said, and stared at her with open nostrils, from which indignant air exploded in gusts.