"Good night, Miss Ethel," said Caroline cheerfully.
For a moment Miss Ethel could not bring words over her lips. That Ellen's niece should return thus at midnight, opening the house door with a latch-key, while she, herself, condoned it, though she disapproved as violently as ever. She felt a sort of tingling shame and resentment like a fighter who has to retreat, as she said in a muffled tone: "Good night, Caroline."
Chapter VI
Morning Calls
Miss Ethel was sawing off the dead branch of a tree that threatened to fall on the path when Mrs. Bradford came out of the house and walked slowly across the garden, saying as she passed: "I don't know what you want to do that for, Ethel. You look quite overheated. Why don't you get a man to do it?"
Miss Ethel—beads of perspiration on her flushed forehead and hands trembling with exertion so that she could scarcely hold the saw—replied with pardonable acerbity: "I didn't get a man because I couldn't. You know that. Talk about unemployment! I only know you can't get a jobbing gardener for half a day, even if you put your pride in your pocket and crawl all round Thorhaven on your hands and knees asking one to come as a favour—besides, what would he charge?"
"Well, leave the branch, then," said Mrs. Bradford. "You do worry yourself so, Ethel."
"Somebody must worry," retorted Miss Ethel. Then the bough split unexpectedly and fell, causing her to graze her hand so that it bled. Immediately afterwards there came a loud crash from the other side of the hedge, and for a moment the two women felt their hearts jump with the old sense of helpless, defiant waiting on fate which they had experienced when bombs fell from enemy aircraft during the war. But the next second they remembered they were safe—though that had ceased to be a thing to thank God for.
"It's only a cartload of bricks being tipped," said Mrs. Bradford rather faintly.