But this was too gross a departure from delicacy of thought and phrase, and Miss Le Pettit, the prick stirring, perchance, signified as much by the cold manner in which she brought back the conversation to the more correct and really more enthralling subject of the Alexandra jacket.

It was generally agreed that Miss Belben, of Bugletown, could not go far wrong with the sleeves if Flora would be so infinitely good as to lend her jacket for a copy, and this favour she accorded graciously to her dear friend, Emilia.

Mr. Constantine walked down the windy hill with his mind already clear both of Loveday and the elegant company in which he had been taking tea.  He was, above all things, a philosopher, and that means that, though his imagination was easily touched, his heart remained unstirred, He had serious thoughts of ordering a new cabriolet, and on arriving at the market place, he turned into the coachbuilder’s to renew the discussion as to whether red or canary yellow were the more fashionable hue for the wheels.

    Chapter I:  In which the Reader is taken
      back A few weeks in Point of time, and
      down several steps in the social scale

Chapter I

In which the Reader is taken back A few weeks in Point of time, and down several steps in the social scale

It was on a balmy day in early Spring that Loveday had first met Miss Le Pettit.  Loveday had gone to fetch the milk.  For Loveday’s aunt, Senath Strick, with whom she lived, was a shiftless, unthrifty woman, never able to keep prosperous enough to own a cow for as long as the beast took between calvings, and the times when Loveday had a fragrant, soft-eyed animal to cherish were mercifully rare.  Mercifully, for Loveday, though she appeared sullen, had ever more sensibility than was good for one in her position, and each time Aunt Senath was forced to sell the cow, Loveday behaved as though she had as good a right to sit and cry herself silly as any young lady with whom nothing was more urgent than to spoil fine cambric with salt water.

This, then, was a period of poverty with the Strick family, and Loveday was sent to fetch the evening milk from the farm at the crest of the hill.  On the way, she came upon Cherry Cotton and Primrose Lear, seated upon a granite stile, their heads together over something Cherry held in her lap.  Cherry heard approaching footsteps, and whipped her apron over the object she and her friend had been so busily discussing.  Loveday was hurt rather than angered by the unkind action, for there was a reason, connected with Primrose, why she had felt a tender curiosity as to what the two girls were guarding so closely.  Yet she was aware of bitterness also—­for it was ever so when she appeared.  Maids ceased their gossip, boys laughed and pointed after her.  She was “different.”