to the spade, which he was about to carry in out of the wet, when he perceived the company under the veranda, and stood still in amazement.  He was a young laborer with a reddish-brown beard of a week’s growth.  He wore corduroy trousers and a linen-sleeved corduroy vest; both, like the hasp and spade, new.  A coarse blue shirt, with a vulgar red-and-orange neckerchief, also new, completed his dress; and, to shield himself from the rain, he held up a silk umbrella with a silver-mounted ebony handle, which he seemed unlikely to have come by honestly.  Miss Wilson felt like a boy caught robbing an orchard, but she put a bold face on the matter and said: 

“Will you allow us to take shelter here until the rain is over?”

“For certain, your ladyship,” he replied, respectfully applying the spade handle to his hair, which was combed down to his eyebrows.  “Your ladyship does me proud to take refuge from the onclemency of the yallovrments beneath my ’umble rooftree.”  His accent was barbarous; and he, like a low comedian, seemed to relish its vulgarity.  As he spoke he came in among them for shelter, and propped his spade against the wall of the chalet, kicking the soil from his hobnailed blucher boots, which were new.

“I came out, honored lady,” he resumed, much at his ease, “to house my spade, whereby I earn my living.  What the pen is to the poet, such is the spade to the working man.”  He took the kerchief from his neck, wiped his temples as if the sweat of honest toil were there, and calmly tied it on again.

“If you’ll ’scuse a remark from a common man,” he observed, “your ladyship has a fine family of daughters.”

“They are not my daughters,” said Miss Wilson, rather shortly.

“Sisters, mebbe?”

“No.”

“I thought they mout be, acause I have a sister myself.  Not that I would make bold for to dror comparisons, even in my own mind, for she’s only a common woman—­as common a one as ever you see.  But few women rise above the common.  Last Sunday, in yon village church, I heard the minister read out that one man in a thousand had he found, ’but one woman in all these,’ he says, ‘have I not found,’ and I thinks to myself, ’Right you are!’ But I warrant he never met your ladyship.”

A laugh, thinly disguised as a cough, escaped from Miss Carpenter.

“Young lady a-ketchin’ cold, I’m afeerd,” he said, with respectful solicitude.

“Do you think the rain will last long?” said Agatha politely.

The man examined the sky with a weather-wise air for some moments.  Then he turned to Agatha, and replied humbly:  “The Lord only knows, Miss.  It is not for a common man like me to say.”

Silence ensued, during which Agatha, furtively scrutinizing the tenant of the chalet, noticed that his face and neck were cleaner and less sunburnt than those of the ordinary toilers of Lyvern.  His hands were hidden by large gardening gloves stained with coal dust.  Lyvern laborers, as a rule, had little objection to soil their hands; they never wore gloves.  Still, she thought, there was no reason why an eccentric workman, insufferably talkative, and capable of an allusion to the pen of the poet, should not indulge himself with cheap gloves.  But then the silk, silvermounted umbrella—­