Not quite the Dorcas Lane, Shoeing and General Smith, that might have been expected after reading her signboard. Had she lived a century earlier or half a century later, she would probably have been found at the forge with a sledge-hammer in her hand for she had indomitable energy and a passion for doing and making things. But hers was an age when any work outside the four walls of a home was taboo for any woman who had any pretensions to refinement, and she had to content herself with keeping the books and attending to the correspondence of the old family business she had inherited. She had found one other outlet for her energy in her post office work, which also provided her with entertainment in the supervision of her neighbours’ affairs and the study and analysis of their motives.

This may sound terrifying as now related, but there was nothing terrifying about Miss Lane. She kept the secrets with which she was entrusted in the course of her official duties most honourably, and if she laughed at some of her customers’ foibles she laughed secretly. “Clever” was the general village description of her. “She’s a clever one, that Miss Lane, as sharp as vinegar, but not bad in her way,” people would afterwards say to Laura. Only her two or three enemies said that if she had lived at one time she’d have been burned as a witch.

That afternoon she was in her most gracious mood. “You’ve come just at the right time,” she said, kissing Laura. “I’ve had a most terrible rush, half a dozen in at once for postal orders and what not, and the telegraph bell ringing like mad all the while. But it’s over now, I think, for the time being, and the afternoon mail is not due for an hour, so come inside, do, both of you, and we’ll have a nice cup of tea before the evening’s work begins.”

Laura experienced a slight shock when she heard of this recent pressure of business. How, she thought, would she ever be able to cope with such rushes. But she need not have feared: the rushes at Candleford Green Post Office existed chiefly in the imagination of the postmistress, who loved to make her office appear more busy and important than it was in reality.

Her father could not stay to tea, as he had his Candleford relations to visit, and Laura watched him drive away with the sinking feeling of one whose last link with a known world is vanishing. But, before the day was out, her childhood’s life seemed long ago and far away to her, there was so much to see and hear and try to grasp in the new one.