There seemed never any violence of thought or emotion at Upper Farm, even the sulks of Primrose were petty in nature, her jealousies made her voice shrill but did not take her by the throat with that intolerable aching stormier women know too well, while her graceless husband was irritated on the surface of his mind as some shallow pool is fretted over its bed of soft ooze, retaining no trace when the ripples have died.  The elder Lear, as befits a good countryman content with his station in life, was too hard-worked for anything save a tired back on his entry at night, and the old wife too occupied with her Martha-like toil for searching into the sensibilities either of herself or of her daughter-in-law.

Loveday, without reasoning on the matter, had yet ever been aware that this slight tide of feeling was all that ever lapped against the household at Upper Farm, therefore when she saw one magpie in the last field before the yard gate she accepted the sign for her own despairing heart alone.  No young woman of education would have paid any attention to such a vulgar superstition, but Loveday had no learning other than what her elders had let fall in her hearing, both when she was supposed to be listening for her betterment, and when it was thought she would not understand the drift of their speech.  And that a single magpie means sorrow was one of the few solid facts Loveday had gleaned by following the garnered sheaves of her elders.

Now, as she stepped over the topmost ledge of the granite stile, there was a fanlike flutter of black and white in her very face, and she stood a moment watching the ill-omened bird wheel and dip behind the thick blossom of the hawthorn hedge.

“There goes my white riband,” thought the ignorant girl, and yet even with the quick fear there welled a fresh and fierce determination in her undisciplined heart.

Her egotism, if not her superstition, was reproved when she reached the farmhouse, and old Madgy, the midwife, coming to the pump for more water, met her with news of what had happened not half an hour earlier.  The shallow creek of Upper Farm had been invaded by a violent and dark tide, on whose ebb two lives had been borne away.  Loveday, staring up at Primrose’s room, saw the withered hand of old Mrs. Lear draw the curtains across the window behind which lay a dead mother and a babe that had never lived.

CHAPTER X:  IN WHICH LOVEDAY DOES NOT ATTEND A FUNERAL

Chapter X

IN WHICH LOVEDAY DOES NOT ATTEND A FUNERAL

“A couple of months too soon her pains took her,” said Madgy; “she has been fretting and wisht these weeks past, with her husband always after some young faggot up country and herself sick with envy at the girls that could still dance with the chaps.  She had no woman’s heart in her, poor soul, to carry her woman’s burden.  Ah! many’s the strange things in women I see at my trade,” and Madgy wrung out a cloth and mumbled to herself—­her old mouth folded inwards, as though she perpetually turned all the secrets that she knew over and over within it.