Mr. Constantine studied her more attentively.
"If all women thought that, there'd be more happy marriages," he said, slipping his hand into his pocket. "You've wisdom on your tongue, whether it's lucky or no. You say you're not a gipsy?"
By this time it had dawned on Loveday what, in her absorption, she had not at first noticed, that she was speaking to one of the gentry, and to no less a one than Mr. Constantine, of Constantine. She stood up and dropped her curtsey out of habit, but sullenly. Oddly enough, it was the sullenness and not the curtsey that took Mr. Constantine's fancy.
"No, sir," said Loveday. "I'm not a gipsy. I'm Loveday Strick."
"Loveday ..." said the gentleman. "Loveday ... That's a beautiful name. No—it's more than a name, it's a phrase. A very beautiful phrase."
Loveday raised her eyes at this strange talk. Mr. Constantine took his hand out of his pocket and held out a silver sixpence.
"Gipsy or no, take that for your gipsy eyes, my dear," he said. Loveday stood hesitant. Even she, who had just begged of Miss Letitia, felt shame at taking a coin in charity. Yet she did so, for before her eyes she saw, not a silver sixpence, but the beginning of a length of white satin riband unrolling towards her through futurity. Perhaps, unknown to herself, her foreign blood prompted her to that sad Jesuitry which teaches all means are justifiable to the desired end. Perhaps she saw nothing beyond the beginning of her riband, but she held out her hand. Mr. Constantine dropped the sixpence into it, touched his cob with his heel and rode on. Loveday stayed in the hedge, the sixpence in her palm and hope once more in her soul. That hope was to faint and fall during the days that followed and saw her quest no nearer its fulfilment.
For who wished to employ the strange, dark girl that had always been aloof and distrusted? And who could credit this violent conversion to the ordered ways of domesticity? Who had the money to squander on help from without, when, within, if there were not enough hands for the work, then the work itself, like an unanswered letter, slipped into that dead place of unremembered things where nothing matters any more? Last week's cleaning left undone adds nothing appreciable to this week's dirt that next week's exertions may not remedy as easily together as singly—or so argued the slovenly housewife, while for the industrious no hands save their own could have scrubbed and polished to their liking.
Here and there Loveday earned a few odd pence, for a few hand's turns done when necessity or charity called in her vagrant services, but the Flora Dance of Bugletown was held upon the eighth of May, and when May Day dawned she had but tenpence for all her store—and the riband would cost as many shillings. Despair settled in her heart for the first time; often before it had knocked but been refused more than a glance within, but now her enfeebled arms could hold the door no longer, and that most dread of all visitors took possession of his own—for is not the human heart Despair's only habitation, without which he is but a homeless wanderer?
CHAPTER IX: IN WHICH LOVEDAY SEES ONE MAGPIE