That, of course, was because Candleford Green, although only eight miles distant, was on another line of railway than that which ran through the market town, and to have gone there by train would have meant two changes and a long wait at the Junction; but the spring-cart brought a spice of novelty into her departure which made “something to talk about,” as the saying went there. At the beginning of the eighteen-nineties any new subject for conversation was precious in such places.

Laura was fourteen and a half, and the thick pigtail of hair which had so far hung down her back had that morning been looped up once and tied with a big black ribbon bow on her neck. When they had first known that she was to go to work in the Post Office at Candleford Green her mother had wondered if she ought not to wear her hair done up with hairpins, grown-up fashion, but when she saw a girl behind the Post Office counter at Sherston wearing hers in a loop with a bow she had felt sure that that was the proper way for Laura to do hers. So the ribbon was bought—black, of course, for her mother said the bright-coloured ribbons most country girls wore made them look like horses, all plaited and beribboned for a fair. ‘And mind you sponge and press it often,’ she had said, “for it cost good money. And when you come to buy your own clothes, always buy the best you can afford. It pays in the end.” But Laura could not bear to think of her mother just then; the parting was too recent.

So she thought of her new trunk. This contained—as well as her everyday clothes and her personal treasures, including her collection of pressed flowers, a lock of her baby brother’s fair hair, and a penny exercise book, presented by her brother Edmund and inscribed by him Laura’s Journal, in which she had promised to write every night—what her mother had spoken of as “three of everything”, all made of stout white calico and trimmed with crochet edging.

“No child of mine,” her mother had often declared, “shall go out in the world without a good outfit. I’d rather starve!” and when the time had come to get Laura ready for Candleford Green the calico, bought secretly from time to time in lengths, had been brought out from its hiding-place to be made up and trimmed with the edging she had been making for months. “I told you it would come in handy for something at some time,” she had said, but Laura knew by her arch little smile she had meant it for her all along.

Her father had made and polished the trunk and studded it with her initials in bright, brass-headed nails, and, deep down in one corner of it, wrapped in tissue paper, was the new half-crown he had given her.