He eyed her with stubborn resentment.

“What I meant to say was that four dollars a day is too much!  Don’t you know anything about the value of money, Miss Orr?  Somebody ought to have common honesty enough to inform you that there are plenty of men in Brookville who would be thankful to work for two dollars a day.  I would, for one; and I won’t take a cent more.”

She was frowning a little over these statements.  The stalwart young man in shabby clothes who sat facing her under the light of Mrs. Solomon Black’s well-trimmed lamp appeared to puzzle her.

“But why shouldn’t you want to earn all you can?” she propounded at last.  “Isn’t there anything you need to use money for?”

“Oh, just a few things,” he admitted grudgingly.  “I suppose you’ve noticed that I’m not exactly the glass of fashion and the mold of form.”

He was instantly ashamed of himself for the crude personality.

“You must think I’m a fool!” burst from him, under the sting of his self-inflicted lash.

She smiled and shook her head.

“I’m not at all the sort of person you appear to think me,” she said.  Her grave blue eyes looked straight into his.  “But don’t let’s waste time trying to be clever:  I want to ask you if you are willing, for a fair salary, to take charge of the outdoor improvements at Bolton House.”

She colored swiftly at sight of the quizzical lift of his brows.

“I’ve decided to call my place ‘Bolton House’ for several reasons,” she went on rapidly:  “for one thing, everybody has always called it the Bolton place, so it will be easier for the workmen and everybody to know what place is meant.  Besides, I—­”

“Yes; but the name of Bolton has an ill-omened sound in Brookville ears,” he objected.  “You’ve no idea how people here hate that man.”

“It all happened so long ago, I should think they might forgive him by now,” she offered, after a pause.

“I wouldn’t call my house after a thief,” he said strongly.  “There are hundreds of prettier names.  Why not—­Pine Court, for example?”

“You haven’t told me yet if you will accept the position I spoke of.”

He passed his hand over his clean-shaven chin, a trick he had inherited from his father, and surveyed her steadily from under meditative brows.

“In the first place, I’m not a landscape gardener, Miss Orr,” he stated.  “That’s the sort of man you want.  You can get one in Boston, who’ll group your evergreens, open vistas, build pergolas and all that sort of thing.”

“You appear to know exactly what I want,” she laughed.

“Perhaps I do,” he defied her.

“But, seriously, I don’t want and won’t have a landscape-gardener from Boston—­with due deference to your well-formed opinions, Mr. Dodge.  I intend to mess around myself, and change my mind every other day about all sorts of things.  I want to work things out, not on paper in cold black and white; but in terms of growing things—­wild things out of the woods.  You understand, I’m sure.”