Boon watched the pair of horsemen trotting to confusion, and clicked in his cheek.  The provincial of the period when coaches were beginning to be threatened by talk of new-fangled rails was proud to boast of his outwitting Londoners on material points; and Boon had numerous tales of how it had been done, to have the laugh of fellows thinking themselves such razors.  They compensated him for the slavish abasement of his whole neighbourhood under the hectoring of the grand new manufacture of wit in London:—­the inimitable Metropolitan pun, which came down to the country by four-in-hand, and stopped all other conversation wherever it was reported, and would have the roar—­there was no resisting it.  Indeed, to be able to see the thing smartly was an entry into community with the elect of the district; and when the roaring ceased and the thing was examined, astonishment at the cleverness of it, and the wonderful shallowness of the seeming deep hole, and the unexhausted bang it had to go off like a patent cracker, fetched it out for telling over again; and up went the roar, and up it went at home and in stable-yards, and at the net puffing of churchwardens on a summer’s bench, or in a cricket-booth after a feast, or round the old inn’s taproom fine.  The pun, the wonderful bo-peep of double meanings darting out to surprise and smack one another from behind words of the same sound, sometimes the same spelling, overwhelmed the provincial mind with awe of London’s occult and prolific genius.

Yet down yonder you may behold a pair of London gentlemen trotting along on as fine a fool’s errand as ever was undertaken by nincompoops bearing a scaled letter, marked urgent, to a castle, and the request in it that the steward would immediately upon perusal down with their you-know-what and hoist them and birch them a jolly two dozen without parley.

Boon smacked his leg, and then drove ahead merrily.

For this had happened to his knowledge:  the gentleman accompanying the lady had refused to make anything of a halt at the Red Lion, and had said he was sure there would be a small public-house at the outskirts of the town, for there always was one; and he proved right, and the lady and he had descended at the sign of the Jolly Cricketers, and Boon had driven on for half an hour by order.

This, too, had happened, external to Boon’s knowledge:  the lady and the gentleman had witnessed, through the small diamond window-panes of the Jolly Cricketers’ parlour, the passing-by of the two horsemen in pursuit of them; and the gentleman had stopped the chariot coming on some fifteen minutes later, but he did not do it at the instigation of the lady.

CHAPTER XX

AT THE SIGN OF THE JOLLY CRICKETERS

The passing by of the pair of horsemen, who so little suspected the treasure existing behind the small inn’s narrow window did homage in Aminta’s mind to her protector’s adroitness.  Their eyes met without a smile, though they perceived the grisly comic of the incident.  Their thoughts were on the chariot to follow.