Hugo paused to contemplate this peaceful edifice. A man walked briskly from one of the barn doors. He perceived Hugo and stopped, holding a spade in his hand. Then, after starting across to the house, he changed his mind and, dropping the spade, approached Hugo.

“Looking for work, my man?”

Hugo smiled. “Why—yes.”

“Know anything about cattle?”

“I was reared in a farming country.”

“Good.” He scrutinized Hugo minutely. “I’ll try you at eight dollars a week, room, and board.” He opened the gate.

Hugo paused. The notion of finding employment somewhere in the country had been fixed in his mind and he wondered why he waited, even as he did, when the charm of the old manor had offered itself to him as if by a miracle. The man swung open the gate; he was lithe, sober, direct.

“My name is Cane—Ralph Cane. We raise blooded Guernsey stock here. At the moment we haven’t a man.”

“I see,” Hugo said.

“I could make the eight ten—in a week—if you were satisfactory.”

“I wasn’t considering the money—”

“How?”

“I wasn’t considering the money.”

“Oh! Come in. Try it.” An eagerness was apparent in his tone. While Hugo still halted on a knoll of indecision, a woman opened the French windows which lined one façade of the house and stepped down from the porch. She was very tall and very slender. Her eyes were slaty blue and there was a delicate suggestion—almost an apparition—of grey in her hair.

“What is it, Ralph?” Her voice was cool and pitched low.

“This is my wife,” Cane said.

“My name is Danner.”

Cane explained. “I saw this man standing by the gate, and now I’m hiring him.”

“I see,” she said. She looked at Hugo. The crystalline substance of her eyes glinted transiently with some inwardness—surprise, a vanishing gladness, it might have been. “You are looking for work?”

“Yes,” Hugo answered.

Cane spoke hastily. “I offered him eight a week and board, Roseanne.”

She glanced at her husband and returned her attention inquisitively to Hugo. “Are you interested?”

“I’ll try it.”

Cane frowned nervously, walked to his wife, and nodded with averted face. Then he addressed Hugo: “You can sleep in the barn. We have quarters there. I don’t think we’ll be in for any more cold weather. If you’ll come with me now, I’ll start you right in.”

Until noon Hugo cleaned stables. There were two dozen cows—animals that would have seemed beautiful to a rustic connoisseur—and one lordly bull with malignant horns and bloodshot eyes. He shoveled the pungent and not offensive débris into a wheelbarrow and transferred it to a dung-heap that sweated with internal humidity. At noon Cane came into the barn.

“Pretty good,” he said, viewing floors fairly shaved by Hugo’s diligence. “Lunch is ready. You’ll eat in the kitchen.”