if
keeping her courage up before those advancing hordes: "Perhaps nobody
will want to buy the land there. Always heard it was boggy."

Mrs. Bradford shook her head silently and went in, followed by her
sister: in a world where all things were now odiously possible, one had
to take what came and make the best of it.

But Miss Ethel already experienced the faint beginning of a state of
suspense which was never to cease, day or night, though at times she
was not conscious of it. She fancied that every person who crossed the
field was an intending buyer, and woke with a start when the old
wardrobe gave the sudden "pop!" in the night to which she had been long
accustomed, thinking for the moment that she heard the first stroke of
a workman's hammer. In truth she was run down with doing most of the
work of the house since Ellen's departure to look after an invalid
mother, besides suffering from several severe colds during the winter,
so that the possibility of new houses being built close at hand had got
on her nerves, and gained an almost ridiculous importance.

She and her sister had thought, like so many others, that they could
escape change by living in one place, but it had followed them, as it
always inexorably does. Shut their eyes as they might, they had to see
neighbours leaving, neighbours dying. And even those who remained did
not continue the same. One day Miss Ethel was obliged to notice how
grey little Mrs. Baker at the newspaper shop was going--and that
brought to mind that she had been married thirty years come Christmas.
Thirty years! It seemed incredible that so much of life had slipped
almost imperceptibly away.

All the same, she _ached_ to stand still. She simply could not realize
that perhaps some other generation would look back on hers as she did
on the past. One Saturday the following lines in the local corner of
the _Thorhaven and County Weekly Budget_--between an advertisement of a
new poultry food and a notice of a fine goat for sale--did express a
little of her state of mind, though they were written by a retired
schoolmistress in the detested Emerald Avenue--

The world is full of hurry and change,
And everything seems so new and strange;
But it's stranger still that one of these days
They'll call what _we're_ doing, "the dear old ways."

It remained incredible, whatever reason might tell her, that anything
more iconoclastic could be hidden in the womb of time than the