"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."
Hugo saw the woman again. She was toiling over a stove, her hair in disarray, a spotted apron covering her long body. He realized that they had no servants, that the three of them constituted the human inhabitants of the estate—but there were shades, innumerable shades, of a long past, and some of those ghosts had crept into Roseanne's slaty eyes. She carried lunch for herself and her husband into a front room and left him to eat in the soft silence.
After lunch Cane spoke to him again. "Can you plough?"
"It's been a long time—but I think so."