“I’m sure he thinks that he could convince you in a day or two that that farm could be worked at a profit if the worker turned it into a market garden, and showed the railway that it would be greatly to their advantage to give him siding and a wagon all to himself. You could do that, Mr. Wingfield. What have you on your hands just now?”
“Time,” he said mournfully. “I’ve time on my hands, and by the Lord Harry it hangs pretty heavy there. I was just thinking how on earth I was going to put in the summer in this place.”
“And you haven’t been here more than a month?”
“Even so. What is a chap to do when he has pottered about the place with a couple of fat dogs at his heels? I love summer and I love the place, but what is a chap to do to keep himself from dying by sheer boredom?”
“Good gracious!” she cried, lifting up her beautifully-fitting gloves so that he was as much impressed by the movement as he would have been if her arms had been bare. “Good gracious! You can talk of being bored at a place so full of possibilities as yours!”
“Possibilities? You see possibilities in the place as well as in me? You look through the eyes of an incorrigible optimist. Your generosity runs away with you. Possibilities? Should I learn how to test the quality of milk, for example? I believe there is a pretty good lot of beasts at the home farm. I wonder, by the way, what becomes of all the milk.”
“Look into that. I don’t want to be the means of depriving any deserving or undeserving family of their perquisites; but you take the first opportunity of placing the transaction—the benefaction—on a proper basis. And take the advice of one who knows, and get rid of that nice lot of beasts which you have heard are on the home farm.”
“You mean to say that they are not a nice lot?”
“They were a nice lot ten years ago, my father told me; but instead of being kept up to the highest level, they have been allowed to degenerate to a frightful extent.”
“How?”