They found her next day in the wood; the wind had risen, and blew against her skirts, so that her feet moved gently as though yet tracing their phantom paces upon the airy floors.  Her head, like a snapped lily, lay forwards and a little to one side, so that her pale cheek rested against the taut white satin of the riband from which she hung.  The wind blew the languid meshes of her hair softly, kissing her once, kissing her twice, and kissing her three times over.

EPILOGUE

Epilogue

Such is the shocking tale of Loveday Strick, a girl who gave her life for a piece of finery.  Is it not small wonder that Miss Le Pettit lamented the sad lack of proportion in the affair?

All for a length of white satin riband....

And yet, there were two people who thought a little differently from the rest of Loveday’s world on the subject.  They were an odd couple to think alike in anything—­it seemed as though even after her death Loveday’s violent unsuitability must persist as a legacy.  They were the refined and polished Mr. Constantine and old Madgy the midwife, a person whom, naturally, he had never met till the day after the Flora, when his philosophic curiosity drew him to search for the lost girl in company with a band of villagers.  It was Madgy who led them to the wood, sure that there was what they sought.  Mr. Constantine and Madgy stood looking at the pale girl when she had been laid upon last year’s leaves at their feet.  One of the men would have taken the riband from her, with some vague notion of returning it, though whether to the graveyard or to the Manor he could not have told.  Mr. Constantine and Madgy put out each a hand to check him.

“Leave it her,” said Mr. Constantine curtly.

“Ay,” answered Madgy, speaking freely as was her wont, for she was, alas, no respecter of persons, “it was more than a white riband to the maid, for all that the fools say.”

Mr. Constantine nodded.  He too saw in that length of satin, now soiled and crumpled, more than a white riband.  He saw passion in it—­passion of hope, of ambition, of love, of adoration, of despair.  Not a piece of finery had ended Loveday’s stormy course, but a symbol of life itself, with more in its stained warp and woof than many lives hold in three-score years and ten.  Like religion, this riband held every experience.  Primrose had known mating and childbearing, anxiety and content and jealousy and death; Mr. Constantine had, in his wandering life of the gentleman of leisure, experienced his moments of keen enjoyment, his tender and romantic interludes; Miss Le Pettit would know decorous wooing, prosperity, pain of giving birth as she duly presented her husband with an heir, sorrow as she saw her chestnut curls greying and her eye gathering the puckers of advancing years around its fading blue.  Yet none of these would know as much as Loveday had known in the short life they all thought so wasted and so incomplete, would feel as much as she had felt—­the whole pageant of passion symbolised by this insensate strip of satin.  She alone had known ecstasy in her brief mad dance across their sylvan stage.