"Tell Godfrey we can be out by Christmas, if he is able to effect a sale," said Miss Ethel. "We must leave the roses, of course, as there will be no garden in Emerald Avenue. The privet hedge has been clipped this year, but it will want pruning in January."
"Oh, Miss Ethel!" said Laura, with a catch in her throat, suddenly feeling the tears running down, though she had no thought of crying a moment earlier.
For Miss Ethel, as she stood there very erect, talking in that dry, clear tone, with her thin face towards the light and the right temple twitching a little, looking out at the garden she had loved to tend, was a sight very touching to a sensitive heart. And though Laura knew that it was not such a terrible misfortune to leave an agreeable house with a nice garden for a smaller one less pleasant, she still felt--ridiculous though her reason knew it to be--that the atmosphere of the low room was charged with something momentous. The throb! throb! throb! of a heavy sea at low tide came through the window, and it sounded to Laura's excited perceptions like the tread of something dreadful coming. Perhaps she was in a state of heightened emotion owing to her nearly approaching marriage, and that made her unduly impressionable, but she did experience a queer, helpless sense of destiny approaching such as you feel in dreams.
But Miss Ethel had conquered a momentary trembling of the lips caused by Laura's tears, and she crisply broke the silence. "I dare say you think we are making a mountain out of a molehill."
"No, no," said Laura eagerly. "Only you will have less work to do, and by next year at this time you may be really glad you are not here."
"Shall I?" said Miss Ethel. "I hope it may be so!"
"Don't take it like that, Miss Ethel!" said Laura in a quick, sharp tone, most unusual for her. "Things can never be as they were again. Is it likely? Look out into the world. There's not a corner where you don't feel the backwash of a storm of some sort. You and I have lived in such a sheltered happy way here that we don't realize what's going on unless we are brought up against it by something in our own lives." She wanted to be kind--yet words which were not very kind came out in spite of herself: and she felt herself trembling a little, as if they had to do with a deep emotion of her own which it distressed her to bring to light. "You can't feel sure of anything or anybody in the whole world. Anybody may change. They can't help it, any more than you can help seeing it." She was very pale now, aghast at what had grown from a faint stirring of unformulated doubt to a spoken reality. Almost every sensitive person has trembled thus before something which has sprung up into sight through the accidental touching of a hidden spot in the mind.