ng on," said Prickett disrespectfully, and he held on till Joanna's
impatience about equalled his extremity; whereupon he sold it to her for
not over fifty per cent, more than he would have asked had he not known
of her ambition. She paid the price manfully, and Prickett went out with
his few sticks.

The Woolpack was inclined to be contemptuous.

"Five thousand pounds for Prickett's old shacks, and his mouldy pastures
that are all burdock and fluke. If Joanna Godden had had any know, she
could have beaten him down fifteen hundred--he was bound to sell, and
she was a fool not to make him sell at her price."

But when Joanna wanted a thing she did not mind paying for it, and she
had wanted Great Ansdore very much, though no one knew better than she
that it was shacky and mouldy. For long it had mocked with its proud
title the triumphs of Little Ansdore. Now the whole manor of Ansdore
was hers, Great and Little, and with it she held the living of Brodnyx
and Pedlinge--it was she, of her own might, who would appoint the next
Rector, and for some time she imagined that she had it in her power to
turn out Mr. Pratt.

She at once set to work, putting her new domain in order. Some of the
pasture she grubbed up for spring sowings, the rest she drained by
cutting a new channel from the Kent Ditch to the White Kemp Sewer. She
re-roofed the barns with slate, and painted and re-tiled the
dwelling-house. This last she decided to let to some family of
gentlepeople, while herself keeping on the farm and the barns. The
dwelling-house of Little Ansdore, though more flat and spreading, was in
every way superior to that of Great Ansdore, which was rather new and
inclined to gimcrackiness, having been built on the site of the first
dwelling, burnt down somewhere in the eighties. Besides, she loved
Little Ansdore for its associations--under its roof she had been born
and her father had been born, under its roof she had known love and
sorrow and denial and victory; she could not bear to think of leaving
it. The queer, low house, with its mixture of spaciousness and
crookedness, its huge, sag-ceilinged rooms and narrow, twisting
passages, was almost a personality to her now, one of the Godden family,
the last of kin that had remained kind.

Her activities were merciful in crowding what would otherwise have been
a sorrowful period of emptiness and anxiety. It is true that Ellen's
behaviour had done much to spoil her triumph, both in the n