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’ve never done big jobs, Sim Soames an’ me.  P’raps we’re not up to it—­but it’d be a fortune to us.”

She was looking down at one of her papers and making pencil marks on it.

“You did some work last year on a little house at Tidhurst, didn’t you?” she said.

To think of her knowing that!  Yes, the unaccountable good luck had actually come to him that two Tidhurst carpenters, falling ill of the same typhoid at the same time, through living side by side in the same order of unsanitary cottage, he and Sim had been given their work to finish, and had done their best.

“Yes, miss,” he answered.

“I heard that when I was inquiring about you.  I drove over to Tidhurst to see the work, and it was very sound and well done.  If you did that, I can at least trust you to do something at the Court which will prove to me what you are equal to.  I want a Stornham man to undertake this.”

“No Tidhurst man,” said Joe Buttle, with sudden courage, “nor yet no Barnhurst, nor yet no Yangford, nor Wratcham shall do it, if I can look it in the face.  It’s Stornham work and Stornham had ought to have it.  It gives me a brace-up to hear of it.”

The tall young lady laughed beautifully and got up.