“What is your name?” she asked

“Kedgers, miss.  I’ve only been here about a twelve-month.  I was took on because I’m getting on in years an’ can’t ask much wage.”

“Can you spare time to take me through the gardens and show me things?”

Yes, he could do it.  In truth, he privately welcomed an opportunity offering a prospect of excitement so novel.  He had shown more flourishing gardens to other young ladies in his past years of service, but young ladies did not come to Stornham, and that one having, with such extraordinary unexpectedness arrived, should want to look over the desolation of these, was curious enough to rouse anyone to a sense of a break in accustomed monotony.  The young lady herself mystified him by her difference from such others as he had seen.  What the man in the shabby livery had felt, he felt also, and added to this was a sense of the practicalness of the questions she asked and the interest she showed and a way she had of seeming singularly to suggest by the look in her eyes and the tone of her voice that nothing was necessarily without remedy.  When her ladyship walked through the place and looked at things, a pale resignation expressed itself in the very droop of her figure.  When this one walked through the tumbled-down grape-houses, potting-sheds and conservatories, she saw where glass was broken, where benches had fallen and where roofs sagged and leaked.  She inquired about the heating apparatus and asked that she might see it.  She asked about the village and its resources, about labourers and their wages.

“As if,” commented Kedgers mentally, “she was what Sir Nigel is—­leastways what he’d ought to be an’ ain’t.”

She led the way back to the fallen wall and stood and looked at it.

“It’s a beautiful old wall,” she said.  “It should be rebuilt with the old brick.  New would spoil it.”

“Some of this is broken and crumbled away,” said Kedgers, picking up a piece to show it to her.

“Perhaps old brick could be bought somewhere,” replied the young lady speculatively.  “One ought to be able to buy old brick in England, if one is willing to pay for it.”

Kedgers scratched his head and gazed at her in respectful wonder which was almost trouble.  Who was going to pay for things, and who was going to look for things which were not on the spot?  Enterprise like this was not to be explained.

When she left him he stood and watched her upright figure disappear through the ivy-grown door of the kitchen gardens with a disturbed but elated expression on his countenance.  He did not know why he felt elated, but he was conscious of elation.  Something new had walked into the place.  He stopped his work and grinned and scratched his head several times after he went back to his pottering among the cabbage plants.

“My word,” he muttered.  “She’s a fine, straight young woman.  If she was her ladyship things ’ud be different.  Sir Nigel ’ud be different, too—­or there’d be some fine upsets.”