f. I can't!"

"I don't want you to. I'm not afraid of those two old ladies," said
Caroline, "if you are. So long!"

But as she went down the terrace again, it was not her own brilliant
future which she saw before her mind's eye, but the desponding curve of
Mrs. Creddle's figure going upstairs again to finish the bedrooms.
Steadfastness, patience, endurance--without being actually aware of it,
she saw those things embodied in that middle-aged woman's figure. Then
her own spirit revolted from the suggestion. "Aunt doesn't
understand," she said, half aloud. "You _have_ to think of yourself
first in these days."

Such was her mood as she emerged from Emerald Avenue into the main
road, walked past the long field where the square board caught the eye
at once amid all that springing verdure, and entered the garden of the
Cottage. Immediately afterwards the front door opened and Miss Ethel
stepped briskly forth. "Oh, there you are, Caroline. I am very
pleased to see you. I suppose Willis will be bringing your box
shortly, but in the meantime----"

"I aren't coming. I have only come to say I aren't coming,"
interrupted Caroline--the measure of her disturbance shown by the fact
that she did not correct this lapse into the Holderness dialect. "I'm
applying to be ticket collector on the promenade," she added, with a
sort of defiant rudeness in her tone. She sub-consciously wanted Miss
Ethel to be "horrid," feeling that it would make the situation easier
to carry off with satisfaction to herself.

But Miss Ethel had been working since half-past six at unaccustomed
blacking of the kitchen stove and such-like tasks in order that the new
maid should see how things ought to be kept and maintain the same high
standard, and she was too utterly weary and disappointed now, to do
anything but reply with a very slight trembling of the lip: "I think
you might have let me know before this, Caroline." For she felt that
if she let herself go, she might burst into ignoble, undignified tears
before this impertinent child--she, who never "gave way" even at a
wedding or a funeral.

Caroline's quick eyes, however, had caught that passing quiver of the
lips, and for one moment all her dreams of independence trembled in the
balance. She was feeling--deeply as even Mrs. Creddle could wish--that
she was behaving badly. Then Miss Ethel chanced to notice Caroline's
blouse, which was made from her own summer dress of twenty years ago,