d rebellious determination to climb up again.

"I'm looking on ahead," she began, while they sat in her parlour
together. "This is a great upheaval, Richard, and I'm just beginning to
feel how great. I'm wondering all manner of things. Will you be so happy
and comfortable along with me, at 'The Seven Stars,' as you are at 'The
Tiger'? You must put that to yourself, you know."

It was so absurd an assumption, that she expected his laughter; and if
he had laughed and answered with inspiration, no harm could have come of
it. But Richard felt annoyed rather than amused. The suggestion seemed
to show that Mrs. Northover was a fool--the last thing he bargained for.
He exhibited contempt. Indeed, he snorted in a manner almost insulting.

"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