"I've never seen the like before--in young
women--neither in lady young women nor in them that's otherwise."
Afterwards had transpired the story of Mrs. Noakes, and the kitchen
grate, Mrs. Noakes having a friend in Miss Lupin, the village
dressmaker.
"I'd not put it past her," was Mrs. Noakes' summing up, "to order a new
one, I wouldn't."
The footman in the shabby livery had been a little wild in his
statements, being rendered so by the admiring and excited state of his
mind. He dwelt upon the matter of her "looks," and the way she lighted
up the dingy dining-room, and so conversed that a man found himself
listening and glancing when it was his business to be an unhearing,
unseeing piece of mechanism.
Such simple records of servitors' impressions were quite enough for
Stornham village, and produced in it a sense of being roused a little
from sleep to listen to distant and uncomprehended, but not unagreeable,
sounds.
One morning Buttle, the carpenter, looked up as Kedgers had done, and
saw standing on the threshold of his shop the tall young woman, who was
a sensation and an event in herself.
"You are the master of this shop?" she asked.
Buttle came forward, touching his brow in hasty salute.
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