nd 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.

"Well, his ship--the _Pegasus_--was bringing him home after two years on
the Australian station. . . . Heaven help me! I'm an old sportswoman
now, and