ng some sheep in, I expect," said
Mrs. Bradford. "He has the lease of it now."

But even as she spoke, her heavy jaw dropped and she stood staring.
Miss Ethel swerved quickly round in the same direction, and her pale
eyes focused. Neither of them uttered a sound as they looked at the
square board which rose slowly above the privet hedge. They could not
see the pole on which it was supported from that position in the
garden, and so it appeared to them like a banner upheld by unseen hands.

"Well," said Mrs. Bradford at last, "we mustn't clip the hedge this
year, that's all. Then----"

"Hedge!" cried Miss Ethel. "What's the use of talking about the hedge
when our home is spoilt? Look! Read!" She pointed to that square
object which flaunted now in all its glaring black and white newness--a
blot against the grey sky.

FOR SALE

FOR THE ERECTION OF VILLAS AND BUNGALOWS

APPLY MESSRS. GLATT & WILSON

Miss Ethel could not have felt deeper dismay if the square notice board
on the pole had been indeed held aloft by the very Spirit of Change
itself, with streaming hair still all aflame from rushing too closely
past a bursting sun. Only those who hate change as she did could ever
understand her dismay.

"We shall be driven out of our house. We shall have to leave," she
said, very pale. "After all these years, we shall have to go. We
_can't_ stand all their nasty little back ways!"

"Where are we to go to?" said Mrs. Bradford. She paused a moment.
"It's the same everywhere. Besides, the houses are not built yet."

There was nothing for them to do but to turn their backs on the board
and walk quietly away, filled with that aching home-sickness for the
quiet past which thousands of middle-aged people were feeling at that
moment all over Europe. Everything was so different, and the knowledge
of it gave to Miss Ethel a constant sense of exasperated discomfort,
like the ache of an internal disease which she could not forget for a
moment.

"I expect," she said after a while, "that Mrs. Graham will once more
tell us to let ourselves go with the tide and not worry. Thank God, I
never was a supine jelly-fish, and I can't start being one now."

"She was talking about servants," said Mrs. Bradford, who was troubled,
but not so troubled, because she took things differently. "I expect
she only meant we should never get another like Ellen; but we can't
expect to do so after having her for eleven years.