The mist crept steadily along inland, muffling the church, the trees beyond—almost hiding the privet hedge from Miss Ethel as she glanced out of the window.
"A heavy roke. I hope it won't last," she said; but she was not really thinking of what she was saying because her attention was engrossed by the noises on the other side of the hedge. Never the same continuously, but always changing, so that the ear never became dulled by knowing what to expect. A sharply whistled tune. Voices. The knock, knock, knock of a tool on a hard substance. A sound of scraping. Then blessed silence for a few seconds. Then knock, knock, knock again. She turned impatiently to Mrs. Bradford, who sat close up to the window reading the paper. "Thank goodness, it is nearly five; the men will be gone directly."
"You should try to get used to it," said Mrs. Bradford. "You have let it get on your nerves." And she returned at once to the newspaper in which she was reading a minutely-reported divorce case; for though a stolid and intensely respectable woman she loved to read these reports. "It is plain to see that the husband wants to get rid of his wife," she said after a while.
"Well, that seems easily done nowadays," said Miss Ethel, listening still as she spoke. "Perhaps women don't realize that though they can easily get rid of an unsatisfactory husband, it will be just as easy for a satisfactory husband to get rid of them."
But Mrs. Bradford did not care for abstract questions. "I expect the Marchioness will have the custody of the children," she said.
So Miss Ethel took up the other half of the paper to try and distract her mind from the noises over the hedge. But every head-line seemed to dart at her sore consciousness as if it were a snake's head with a sting in it. Murder. Unrest. Strikes. Dissatisfactions. Change. The whole outlook was indescribably comfortless and depressing to her. She felt something akin to the vague, apprehensive misery—beyond reason or common sense—which people feel during the rumble of a distant earthquake.
"I hate reading the papers," she said, flinging the sheet down.
"You shouldn't read the parts that worry you. I don't," said Mrs. Bradford. "But you always were one to work yourself up about things. I remember once how you fretted over some little newsboys with no stockings on, when we went into Flodmouth as children to see the pantomime. You worried yourself and everybody else to death. But they were used to it, as dear father said, and it did them no harm. You are of the worrying sort, Ethel, and you should try to hold yourself in."
"Poor world if nobody worried," said Miss Ethel; then she rose abruptly and carried out the tea-tray.
Soon she was back again with a duster in her hand, beginning to dust the large bookshelf, which had been overlooked for a day or two. As her duster passed over the red-leather backs of the old bound volumes of Punch she saw with a wistful inner eye—as if she looked back to a Promised Land on which the gate was shut for ever—that world of swells and belles, of croquet and sunshine, of benevolence to the "poor" and fingers touching forelocks, black being black and white white.