generation, the thing she had just
said was accepted as law, clung to as a possession, any divergence from
it being a grievance sullenly and bitterly grumbled over. And in places
enough there was divergence in these days--the gentry sending to London
for things, and having up workmen to do their best-paying jobs for them.
The law had been so long a law that no village could see justice
in outsiders being sent for, even to do work they could not do well
themselves. It showed what she was, this handsome young woman--even
though she did come from America--that she should know what was right.

She took a note-book out and opened it on the rough table before her.

"I have made some notes here," she said, "and a sketch or two. We must
talk them over together."

If she had given Joe Buttle cause for surprise at the outset, she gave
him further cause during the next half-hour. The work that was to be
done was such as made him open his eyes, and draw in his breath. If
he was to be allowed to do it--if he could do it--if it was to be
paid for--it struck him that he would be a man set up for life. If her
ladyship had come and ordered it to be done, he would have thought the
poor thing had gone mad. But this one had it all jotted down in a clear
hand, without the least feminine confusion of detail, and with here and
there a little sharply-drawn sketch, such as a carpenter, if he could
draw, which Buttle could not, might have made.

"There's not workmen enough in the village to do it in a year, miss," he
said at last, with a gasp of disappointment.

She thought it over a minute, her pencil poised in her hand and her eyes
on his face.

"Can you," she said, "undertake to get men from other villages, and
superintend what they do? If you can do that, the work is still passing
through your hands, and Stornham will reap the benefit of it. Your
workmen will lodge at the cottages and spend part of their wages at the
shops, and you who are a Stornham workman will earn the money to be made
out of a rather large contract."

Joe Buttle became quite hot. If you have brought up a family for years
on the proceeds of such jobs as driving a ten-penny nail in here or
there, tinkering a hole in a cottage roof, knocking up a shelf in
the vicarage kitchen, and mending a panel of fence, to be suddenly
confronted with a proposal to engage workmen and undertake "contracts"
is shortening to the breath and heating to the blood.

"Miss," he said, "we