"We'll get it all back," she told him. "Our lambs ull be the biggest at
market, and ull fetch the biggest prices too."

It pleased Joanna to talk of Socknersh and herself as "we," though she
would bitterly have resented any idea of joint responsibility in the
days of Fuller. The rites of lambing and shearing had not dimmed her
faith in the high priest she had chosen for Ansdore's most sacred
mysteries. Socknersh was a man who was automatically "good with sheep."
The scared and trembling ewes seemed to see in him a kind of affinity
with themselves, and lay still under his big, brown, quiet hands. He had
not much "head," but he had that queer inward kinship with animals which
is sometimes found in intensely simple natures, and Joanna felt equal to
managing the "head" part of the business for both. It pleased her to
think that the looker--who is always the principal man on a farm such as
Ansdore, where sheep-rearing is the main business--deferred to her
openly, before the other hands, spoke to her with drawling respect, and
for ever followed her with his humble eyes.

She liked to feel those eyes upon her. All his strength and bigness, all
his manhood, huge and unaware, seemed to lie deep in them like a monster
coiled up under the sea. When he looked at her he seemed to lose that
heavy dumbness, that inarticulate stupidity which occasionally stirred
and vexed even her good disposition; his mouth might still be shut, but
his eyes were fluent--they told her not only of his manhood but of her
womanhood besides.

Socknersh lived alone in the looker's cottage which had always belonged
to Ansdore. It stood away on the Kent Innings, on the very brink of the
Ditch, which here gave a great loop, to allow a peninsula of Sussex to
claim its rights against the Kentish monks. It was a lonely little