Laura rose in a hesitating fashion. "Do you think so? Well, I suppose I had better go. Mrs. Bradford will be glad when the sale is over. She will be happier in a boarding-house at Scarborough."
They were at the front door now; and to avoid looking at each other they both glanced at the man who was wheeling a barrow-load of building implements in from the field across the place where the privet hedge used to be.
"I suppose that is for the improvements to the Cottage?" said Laura, who seemed as if she could not go and yet did not really want to stay.
"Yes. They begin altering the outside buildings before the sale," said Caroline; but all the time she was asking within herself: "What is it? What is it?"
Again they looked at the man, who was now trudging back over the newly-laid sods.
"Poor Miss Ethel!" said Laura. "She would not have liked that, would she?"
Caroline shook her head, not speaking—it was all so curiously far off from what they were both thinking about that words only seemed to echo from a distance. "There have to be changes," she said at last, growing afraid of the pause lest it should imply too much.
"Well, Miss Ethel always hated change," said Laura. Then her expression began to alter curiously under Caroline's eyes—becoming charged, as it were, with an inner radiance that shone right through the outer dullness, or embarrassment, or sadness—whatever there might be. "At any rate, she has gone where things are certain."
Caroline's heart beat fast with the sudden impact of discovery. Laura, too, then! They were both just like people hanging on to a spar in a rough sea and hoping to be thrown on shore at last. That was what life was, even when you were going to be married to the man of your choice. But the expression of Laura's face—or was it that thought of a rough sea?—had in some way brought back that time in the pay-box after Miss Ethel's death, when Caroline herself had looked up at the blue sky breaking through the grey. Once more she tried to grope across the barrier between the seen and the unseen.
What was there after all? Then a line of one of those Sunday-school hymns floated across her mind—"Oh, Thou that changest not"—And the thought of Miss Ethel on the stairs with that heavy pail in her hand.