All this seemed surprisingly human to Laura, who had hitherto looked upon gipsies as outcasts, robbers of hen roosts, stealers of children, and wheedlers of pennies from pockets even poorer than their own. Now she met them on a business footing, and they never begged from her and very seldom tried to sell her a comb or a length of lace from their baskets, but one day an old woman for whom she had written a letter offered to tell her fortune. She was perhaps the most striking-looking person Laura ever saw in her life: tall for a gipsy, with flashing black eyes and black hair without a fleck of grey in it, although her cheeks were deeply wrinkled and leathery. Some one had given her a man’s brightly-coloured paisley-patterned dressing-gown, which she wore as an outdoor garment with a soft billy-cock hat. Her name was Cinderella Doe and her letters came so addressed, without a prefix.

The fortune was pleasing. Whoever heard of one that was not? There was no fair man or dark man or enemy to beware of in it, and though she promised Laura love, it was not love of the usual kind. “You’re going to be loved,” she said, “loved by people you’ve never seen and never will see.” A graceful way of thanking one for writing a letter.

Friends and acquaintances who came to the Post Office used often to say to Laura: “How dull it must be for you here.” But although she sometimes agreed mildly for the sake of not appearing peculiar, Laura did not find life at the Post Office at all dull. She was so young and new to life that small things which older people might not have noticed surprised and pleased her. All day interesting people were coming in— interesting to her, at least—and if there were intervals between these callers, there was always something waiting to be done. Sometimes, in a few spare moments, Miss Lane would come in and find her reading a book from the parlour or the Mechanics’ Institute. Although she had not actually forbidden reading for pleasure on duty, she did not altogether approve of it, for she thought it looked business-like. So she would say, rather acidly: “Are you sure you can learn nothing more from the Rule Book?” and Laura would once more take down from its shelf the large, cream, cardboard-bound tome she had already studied until she knew many of the rules word for word. From even that dry-as-dust reading she extracted some pleasure. On one page, for instance, set in a paragraph composed of stiff, official phrases, was the word “mignonette.” It referred only to the colour of a form, or something of that kind, but to Laura it seemed like a pressed flower, still faintly scented.