She laughed, all the sting gone, when she saw what a milliner’s paradise it was from which she was kept out, and put her foot on the first step of the stile.

“By your lave, Cherry Cotton!” she said, and swung lightly over, balancing her jar, while they still stared at the change in her.

CHAPTER III:  IN WHICH SHE FOR THE FIRST TIME FEELS AS A GIRL

Chapter III

IN WHICH SHE FOR THE FIRST TIME FEELS AS A GIRL

Primrose Lear was wife to the son of old Farmer Lear, of Upper Farm, whither Loveday was bound.  Willie Lear, the young man, was gay and handsome, and generally off on any and every job that took him abroad, from buying a pig to selling his own senses for a few mugs of cider.  Farmer Lear was usually out in the fields, and Mrs. Lear, wrinkled like a winter apple and tuneful as a winter robin, was as a rule alone in the big kitchen or cool dairy, for small help did her daughter-in-law give her about the house.

To-day, however, Mrs. Lear was in the parlour, and no less a personage than Miss Le Pettit of Ignores was seated on the best horsehair armchair, her bonneted head, with its drooping feather, leaning gracefully against the lace antimacassar, and her small prunella boots elegantly crossed on the smiling cheeks of the beadwork cherub that adorned the footstool, and that seemed to be puffing the harder, as though to try and puff those little feet up to the heaven where he belonged, trusting to his wings (of the best pearl beads) to bear him after her.

Loveday paused, stricken, not with embarrassment, but with awe, upon the threshold.

Sight of Cherry and Primrose had deepened her sense of her own isolation and her pain.  Sight of Miss Le Pettit made her forget all save what she saw.

Blow, little cherub, puff your cherubic hardest, never can you waft Flora Le Pettit higher than she now is, at least in the sight of one pair of black eyes, higher, perhaps, than she will ever be again, even in that of her own not uncomplacent orbs.

Blow, little cherub, but even if you burst the roseate beads from off your cheeks in your ardour, leaving forlornly drooping the grey threads that would show you as, after all, of mere mortal manufacture, you could not cast a doubt as big as the tiniest bead upon the heavenly origin of Miss Le Pettit—­not, at least, in the heart of the devout worshipper born in that instant upon the black woollen doormat.

The angelic visitant put up a tortoise-shell lorgnon and examined the newcomer with a flicker of condescending interest.  For Flora was a young lady of great sensibility, and though, of course, all females are filled by nature with that interesting and appealing quality, the finer amongst them educate and make an art of it.  Miss Le Pettit, then, encouraged her sensibility, nursed it, nourished it, on the most exquisite of novels and the rarest of romances, and these had taught her to show even more sensibility than usual at sight of a barefoot girl with black hair and eyes and an arresting, though wholly unconscious air that could but be described by Miss Le Pettit, to herself and afterwards to her friends, as Italianate.