tammered. "It
hasn't been much."

Miss Vanderpoel neither assented to nor dissented from this last
palpable truth. She regarded Buttle with searching eyes. She was
wondering if any practical ability concealed itself behind his dullness.
If she gave him work, could he do it? If she gave the whole village
work, was it too far gone in its unspurred stodginess to be roused to
carrying it out?

"There is a great deal to be done now," she said. "All that can be done
in the village should be done here. It seems to me that the villagers
want work--new work. Do they?"

Work! New work! The spark of life in her steady eyes actually
lighted a spark in the being of Joe Buttle. Young ladies in
villages--gentry--usually visited the cottagers a bit if they were
well-meaning young women--left good books and broth or jelly, pottered
about and were seen at church, and playing croquet, and finally married
and removed to other places, or gradually faded year by year into
respectable spinsterhood. And this one comes in, and in two or three
minutes shows that she knows things about the place and understands. A
man might then take it for granted that she would understand the thing
he daringly gathered courage to say.

"They want any work, miss--that they are sure of decent pay for--sure of
it."

She did understand. And she did not treat his implication as an
impertinence. She knew it was not intended as one, and, indeed, she saw
in it a sort of earnest of a possible practical quality in Buttle.
Such work as the Court had demanded had remained unpaid for with quiet
persistence, until even bills had begun to lag and fall off. She could
see exactly how it had been done, and comprehended quite clearly a lack
of enthusiasm in the presence of orders from the Great House.

"All work will be paid for," she said. "Each week the workmen will
receive their wages. They may be sure. I will be responsible."

"Thank you, miss," said Buttle, and he half unconsciously touched his
forehead again.

"In a place like this," the young lady went on in her mellow voice, and
with a reflective thoughtfulness in her handsome eyes, "on an estate
like Stornham, no work that can be done by the villagers should be done
by anyone else. The people of the land should be trained to do such work
as the manor house, or cottages, or farms require to have done."

"How did she think that out?" was Buttle's reflection. In places such
as Stornham, through generation after