For all her woodland timidity, Loveday was prone to those flashes of temper to which the weak in defence and the strong in feeling seem peculiarly exposed. She snatched the shielding apron back from the lap of the buxom Cherry, stamping her foot the while. Cherry, too amazed to protect her treasure, stared, slack-mouthed.
Primrose flew into a temper that surpassed Loveday's, already failing her through dismay at her own action, even as the thunder, to children, surpasses in terrifying quality the lightning.... And, had they but known it, Primrose's sounding tantrums held as much possibility of danger, compared with Loveday's rage, as holds the crash compared with the flash. But they knew it not, and already Loveday stood panting a little and spent with her own storm, while Primrose gathered herself, undaunted, for the attack.
A hail of words would have beaten about Loveday's drooping head had not Cherry, all unwitting, come to the rescue with a cry on the discovery that her treasures, thus disturbed, had fallen to the ground, which was muddy enough, owing to the habit of the cattle of trampling the soil around the stiles.
"Oh, my fairings, my fairings!" cried Cherry, swooping at them from her height with all the headlong thump of a gannet after its prey. Loveday's dive was as the gull's for grace contrasted with it. Their hands met; Loveday divined in an instant, by the tug of Cherry's, that she was suspected of trying to snatch the fairings, instead of merely restoring them, and she straightened herself with a return of her sick anger. Cherry clutched the frail morsels of riband and lace in her lap, then, seeing there was no danger, began to straighten them out, scolding the while.
"There, see, Primrose love, that edging is all crumpled ... did you ever see the like? Never mind, I'll press it out for 'ee, and it'll look as good as new. And this riband, that's the one I bought off Bendigo, the pedlar, for Flora Day—oh, my dear life, what'll I do with it now?"
"'Tis a gurt shame, that's what 'tis," said Primrose, resentful both for her friend's riband and her own edging; "and I'd get my Willie to make her buy new, only 'tis no good asking paupers for money, because, even if they was to be sold up, all their sticks and cloam wouldn't fetch enough for a yard o' this riband."
The vulgar taunt had sting enough to rouse Loveday to a wholesome contempt that saved her. She stood staring with a genuine scorn at the little articles of lace and artificial flowers which Cherry's beau had given her at the last fair. Yes, even at the riband which had been Cherry's special pride as bought by herself from the pedlar, and it was one that had taken Loveday's eye with its delicate beauty—for it was of palest rose, like the shells she picked up on the beach, not a crude red or blue, such as she saw in the shops at Bugletown when she went in on market days. Secretly, something in her marvelled that such a riband had been Cherry's choice, and her scorning of it now was the easier because she hated to think she and the blowsy damsel could have a taste in common.
"You and your fal-lals!" she exclaimed; "here's a fine boutigo to make of a parcel of ribands and laces that'll make you look like a couple of the puppets at Corpus Fair. If you wear such as those to the Flora you'll be mistook for a Maypole, and folk'll dance round you."
"Well, folks 'ull never dance even round you, unless you're burnt as a guy in a bonfire, let alone dancing with you, Loveday Strick," rejoined Primrose, "and so you do very well knaw, and that's why your heart's sick against us."
A minute ago, and that had been true; it was for her isolation Loveday had raged, but when she had seen these two draw their aprons over their girl's treasures, she had not guessed those possessions aright. What she had imagined in her girl's heart, knowing Primrose's condition, it is not for us to pry at; whatever it was, it was so swift, so born of instinct, as to be holy. But when she saw the crumpled finery, she was suddenly too much of a child again to rate it worth envy. The things that Primrose, all unthinking, stood for, the things of warm hearth and hallowed bed that her house had never known, might have power to draw the woman out in her all too soon, but the things that merely charm the feminine still left her chill.