Bob Battle nodded.

“I may have been carried away and forced it on to her too violent, or I may have put it wrong,” he said. “’Tis an interesting subject; but we’d better let it rest.”

So nothing more was heard of that affair at the time; though Bob stopped on, and Mary never once alluded to the thing afterwards.  In fact, it was sinking to a nine days’ wonder with us, when blessed if she didn’t fly over once more—­this time in the middle of a January afternoon.

“He’s done it again!” she shouted out to me, where I stood shifting muck in the yard.  “He’s offered himself again, Rupert!  What’s the world coming to?”

This time she had put on her bonnet and cloak and, Dart being in spate, she’d got on her pony and ridden round by the bridge.

She was excited, and her lip bivered like a baby’s.  To get sense out of her was beyond us, and after she’d talked very wildly for two hours and gone home again, my wife and me compared notes about her state; and my wife said that Mary wasn’t displeased at heart, but rather proud about it than not; while I felt the contrary, and believed the man was getting on her nerves.

“’Tis very bad for her having this sort of thing going on, if ’tis to become chronic,” I said.  “And if Bob was a self-respecting man, as he claims to be, he wouldn’t do it.  I’m a good bit surprised at him.”

“She’d send him going if she didn’t like it,” declared Susan, and I reminded her that my sister had actually talked of doing so.  But it died down again, and Bob held on, and I had speech with Noah Sweet and his wife; and they said that Mary was just as usual and Bob as busy as a bee.

However, my sister spoke of it off and on, and when I asked her if the man persecuted her, and if she wanted my help to thrust him out once for all, she answered thus: 

“You can’t call it persecution,” she told me, “but often he says of a night, speaking in general like, that an Englishman never knows when he’s beat, and things like that; and when he went to Plymouth, he spent a month of his money and bought me a ring, with a proper precious blue stone in it for my sixty-sixth birthday.  And nothing will do but I wear it on my rheumatic finger.  In fact you can’t be even with the man, and I feel like a bird afore a snake.”

All the same she wouldn’t let me speak a word to him.  She wept a bit, and then she began to laugh and, in fact, went on about it like a giglet wench of twenty-five.  But my firm impression continued to be that she was suffering and growing feared of Battle, and would soon be in the doctor’s hands for her nerves, if something weren’t done.

I troubled a good bit and tried to get a definite view out of her, but I failed.  Then I had a go at Bob too; but for the first time since I had known him, he was a bit short and sharp like, and what I had to say didn’t interest him in the least.  In fact he told me in so many words to mind my own business and leave him to mind his.