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“How is one to know?” said George.

“Five years from now, or so on, maybe, you’ll be lookin’ over your first year’s accounts, and, knowin’ what you’ll know then, you’ll say: ‘Well, Billy Beartup’–or Old Cloke as it might be–‘did me proper when I was new.’ No man likes to have that sort of thing laid up against him.”

“I think I see,” said George. “But five years is a long time to look ahead.”

“I doubt if that oak Billy Beartup throwed in Reuben’s Ghyll will be fit for her drawin-room floor in less than seven,” Cloke drawled.

“Yes, that’s my work,” said Sophie. (Billy Beartup of Griffons, a woodman by training and birth, a tenant farmer by misfortune of marriage, had laid his broad axe at her feet a month before.) “Sorry if I’ve committed you to another eternity.”

“And we shan’t even know where we’ve gone wrong with your new carriage drive before that time either,” said Cloke, ever anxious to keep the balance true with an ounce or two in Sophie’s favour. The past four months had taught George better than to reply. The carriage road winding up the hill was his present keen interest. They set off to look at it, and the imported American scraper which had blighted the none too sunny soul of “Skim” Winsh, the carter.

But young Iggulden was in charge now, and under his guidance, Buller and Roberts, the great horses, moved mountains.

“You lif’ her like that, an’ you tip her like that,” he explained to the gang. “My uncle he was roadmaster in Connecticut.”

“Are they roads yonder?” said Skim, sitting under the laurels.

“No better than accommodation roads. Dirt, they call ’em. They’d suit you, Skim.”

“Why?” said the incautious Skim.

“Cause you’d take no hurt when you fall out of your cart drunk on a Saturday,” was the answer.

“I didn’t last time neither,” Skim roared.

After the loud laugh, old Whybarne of Gale Anstey piped feebly, “Well, dirt or no dirt, there’s no denyin’ Chapin knows a good job when he sees it. ‘E don’t build one day and dee-stroy the next, like that nigger Sangres.”

“SHE’s the one that knows her own mind,” said Pinky, brother to Skim Winsh, and a Napoleon among carters who had helped to bring the grand piano across the fields in the autumn rains.

“She had ought to,” said Iggulden. “Whoa, Buller! She’s a Lashmar. They never was double-thinking.”

“Oh, you found that? Has the answer come from your uncle?” said Skim, doubtful whether so remote a land as America had posts.

The others looked at him scornfully. Skim was always a day behind the fair. Iggulden rested from his labours. “She’s a Lashmar right enough. I started up to write to my uncle–at once–the month after she said her folks came from Veering Holler.”

“Where there ain’t any roads?” Skim interrupted, but none laughed.

“My uncle he married an American woman for his second, and she took it up like a like the coroner. She’s a Lashmar out of the old Lashmar place, ‘fore they sold to Conants. She ain’t no Toot Hill Lashmar, nor any o’ the Crayford lot. Her folk come out of the ground here, neither chalk nor forest, but wildishers. They sailed over to America–I’ve got it all writ down by my uncle’s woman–in eighteen hundred an’ nothing. My uncle says they’re all slow begetters like.”

“Would they be gentry yonder now?” Skim asked.

“Nah–there’s no gentry in America, no matter how long you’re there. It’s against their law. There’s only rich and poor allowed. They’ve been lawyers and such like over yonder for a hundred years but she’s a Lashmar for all that.”

“Lord! What’s a hundred years?” said Whybarne, who had seen seventy-eight of them.

“An’ they write too, from yonder–my uncle’s woman writes–that you can still tell ’em by headmark. Their hair’s foxy-red still–an’ they throw out when they walk. He’s in-toed-treads like a gipsy; but you watch, an’ you’ll see ‘er throw, out–like a colt.”