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.

But that only lasted a moment--the next, she was not