As she spoke, she entered the room where I lay.  She and Mr. Smithson were coming for some papers contained in the bureau.  They did not know I was there, and Mr. Smithson started a little when he saw me, as he must have been aware that I had overheard something.  But my lady did not change a muscle of her face.  All the world might overhear her kind, just, pure sayings, and she had no fear of their misconstruction.  She came up to me, and kissed me on the forehead, and then went to search for the required papers.

“I rode over the Connington farms yesterday, my lady.  I must say I was quite grieved to see the condition they are in; all the land that is not waste is utterly exhausted with working successive white crops.  Not a pinch of manure laid on the ground for years.  I must say that a greater contrast could never have been presented than that between Harding’s farm and the next fields—­fences in perfect order, rotation crops, sheep eating down the turnips on the waste lands—­everything that could be desired.”

“Whose farm is that?” asked my lady.

“Why, I am sorry to say, it was on none of your ladyship’s that I saw such good methods adopted.  I hoped it was, I stopped my horse to inquire.  A queer-looking man, sitting on his horse like a tailor, watching his men with a couple of the sharpest eyes I ever saw, and dropping his h’s at every word, answered my question, and told me it was his.  I could not go on asking him who he was; but I fell into conversation with him, and I gathered that he had earned some money in trade in Birmingham, and had bought the estate (five hundred acres, I think he said,) on which he was born, and now was setting himself to cultivate it in downright earnest, going to Holkham and Woburn, and half the country over, to get himself up on the subject.”

“It would be Brooke, that dissenting baker from Birmingham,” said my lady in her most icy tone.  “Mr. Smithson, I am sorry I have been detaining you so long, but I think these are the letters you wished to see.”

If her ladyship thought by this speech to quench Mr. Smithson she was mistaken.  Mr. Smithson just looked at the letters, and went on with the old subject.

“Now, my lady, it struck me that if you had such a man to take poor Horner’s place, he would work the rents and the land round most satisfactorily.  I should not despair of inducing this very man to undertake the work.  I should not mind speaking to him myself on the subject, for we got capital friends over a snack of luncheon that he asked me to share with him.”

Lady Ludlow fixed her eyes on Mr. Smithson as he spoke, and never took them off his face until he had ended.  She was silent a minute before she answered.

“You are very good, Mr. Smithson, but I need not trouble you with any such arrangements.  I am going to write this afternoon to Captain James, a friend of one of my sons, who has, I hear, been severely wounded at Trafalgar, to request him to honour me by accepting Mr. Horner’s situation.”