It seemed to Loveday that the whole world was dancing. The faces of the crowd, the bobbing ringlets, swelling skirts, the bright eyes and bright instruments, the houses that peered at her with their polished panes, all danced in a mad haze of mingled light and blackness. Sun, moon and stars joined in, heads and feet whirled so madly that none could have said which was upper-most. Creation was a-dancing, and she alone stood to be mocked at in a reeling world. This was the merry measure she had striven to join! She must have been mad indeed!
Turning blindly, she ran through the crowd that gave at her approach, and all day the dancing went on without her. The flutter of her blasphemous sash did not profane the sunlight in the streets of Bugletown, nor pollute with its passing the houses of the good wives. Like a swallow's wing, it had but flashed across the ordered ways and was gone.
Yet Loveday's ambition was, after all, fulfilled that day. For she danced—and danced a measure she could not have trod without the white satin sash.... Good folk in Bugletown footed it down the cobbled streets, and through paved kitchens; Loveday danced a finer step on insubstantial ether, into realms more vast. Were those realms dark for her, thus violated by her enforced entry of them? Who can say, save those folk of Bugletown who knew that to her first crime she had added a second even greater?
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.