up with a
bluish light her pale, thin face. Her lips moved as she murmured to
herself for comfort: "The _same_ yesterday, to-day and for ever." But
she could not find anything to hold on to in that any more.

Then she heard an unexpected sound at the door, and the next minute
Caroline came in, drawing off her gloves.

"I'll see to the hot water, Miss Ethel," she said.

"You are in early to-night," said Miss Ethel.

"Yes." Caroline paused. "Oh, I have been going to tell you that I
shall----" But with the words nearly over her lips, she found herself
unable to speak them. "Shall be late in to-morrow," she substituted;
for somehow she could not after all cut herself adrift from this house
yet, though she came fresh from a conversation which had left her
burning with annoyance.

She tingled still at the recollection of one girl saying to another in
passing: "That's Caroline Raby! What's she doing? Oh, she's in
service." And at the memory of her own sharply-flung: "I'm not in
service, then! I take tickets on the promenade and I'm going into an
office after that."

But though it was evident that she was regarded by some as being in
service, and though she felt no higher regard for it than anyone else
who has just emerged from women's oldest and grandest profession, she
could not bring herself to break the threads which held her to these
two women--and to something beyond them which she would not realize.
But after she was in bed, she could see in the darkness the church
window in the sunset, and the altar rails, and the clergyman standing
as he would do when Wilson and Laura were married.

So the three women lay in bed, thinking their own thoughts, with the
sea moaning--moaning--as it broke in a long even wave and withdrew on
the soft sand; quite a different sound every day, though Miss Ethel had
heard it for fifty-six years. But she was scarcely conscious of
hearing it at all, though it had formed an accompaniment to every
thought and action of her life during all those years.

But to-night--perhaps because it was so warm and still, and she had the
window facing the sea wide open--she did really listen to the waves;
and that sound might perhaps have comforted her, with its deep note of
unhasting permanence, if the ears of her mind had also been open to
hear. But she only felt its melancholy. It seemed to accentuate her
forlorn sense of having nothing stationary to hold on to, not even an
unchanging Go