“Good den, Ursula. Wither away?”
“Truly, Master, to the whitster’s with this bundle.”
The whitster meant what we should now call a dyer and cleaner.
“Do you mind, Ursula, what the Prophet Daniel saith, that ‘many shall be purified and made white’? Methinks it is going on now. White, as no fuller on earth can white them! May you and I be so cleansed, friend! Good den.”
Ursula courtesied and escaped, and Mr Ewring passed through the gate, and went up to his desolated home. He stood a moment in the mill-door, looking back over the town which he had just left.
“‘The night cometh, when no man can work,’” he said to himself. “Grant me, Lord, to be about Thy business until the Master cometh!”
And he knew, while he said it, that in all likelihood to him that coming would be in a chariot of fire, and that to be busied with that work would bring it nearer and sooner.