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 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.”