But the thoughts passed so quickly that Laura had not noticed the pause. "I like to fancy Miss Ethel in a place where things don't change. It makes you think, when somebody you know goes——" And Caroline saw Laura felt the same; was drawn more closely in touch with this eternity to which Miss Ethel had just gone over.
Then a man over in the field shouted loudly to his mate. Both girls glanced, half startled, in that direction, and when they looked at each other again the mental atmosphere had quite altered.
"Well, I must be going," said Laura.
But it was still so evident she had left something unsaid, that Caroline remained half-consciously expectant in the doorway. And a few steps down the drive Laura did suddenly stop short, pause a moment and return with quick, nervous steps. "Oh, by the way, I suppose you won't know that my engagement with Mr. Wilson is broken off?"
For a moment—an age—Caroline's throat seemed to dry up, and she felt like a person in a nightmare struggling to make a sound which will not come. Then, out of all the turmoil of questions, fears, emotions that Laura's words had caused to seethe within her, she was only able to bring to the surface: "I—I didn't know."
"No?" Laura paused. "Well, you'll tell Mrs. Bradford I have been——" And she hurried away down the drive; but she had not yet lost that air of having left something unsaid which she had come on purpose to say.
Caroline could see her near the gate, then paused a moment as at the approach of voices; and the next minute Mr. and Mrs. Graham came in, accompanying Mrs. Bradford. Their attitudes were most plainly visible to Caroline in the doorway, though she could not hear what was said; Mrs. Bradford solidly engrossed in her own importance as a mourner—Mr. Graham bending forward to speak to Laura, conciliatory, voluble; and Laura herself unresponsive.
Caroline gave a last look at them before going indoors to take the potatoes from the fire; and as she did so, she experienced one of those sudden, blindingly clear moments of intuition common to almost every one, in which the processes of fact, argument, reason are all skipped, and the knowledge is there, full blown. She knew perfectly well that Mr. and Mrs. Graham had felt it their solemn duty to inform Laura—with the best intentions—of what was being said about Godfrey Wilson and the girl on the promenade.
But before she had time to turn away the group dissolved, Laura going on alone, while Mrs. Bradford and Mrs. Graham came up the drive. The picture bit like acid into her mind. The three coming up the path; the clear sky; the man with the barrow wheeling cement over the forlorn dismantled part of the garden where the privet hedge had been.
But in the kitchen, while she was taking the potatoes from the steamer, her face suddenly flushed crimson. "I aren't going to be frightened," she murmured to herself. "I aren't going to care what anybody says. She would never break off her engagement because of a bit of scandal. She's not that sort. They'll be married, all right."