"Leave it her," said Mr. Constantine curtly.
"Ay," answered Madgy, speaking freely as was her wont, for she was, alas, no respecter of persons, "it was more than a white riband to the maid, for all that the fools say."
Mr. Constantine nodded. He too saw in that length of satin, now soiled and crumpled, more than a white riband. He saw passion in it—passion of hope, of ambition, of love, of adoration, of despair. Not a piece of finery had ended Loveday's stormy course, but a symbol of life itself, with more in its stained warp and woof than many lives hold in three-score years and ten. Like religion, this riband held every experience. Primrose had known mating and childbearing, anxiety and content and jealousy and death; Mr. Constantine had, in his wandering life of the gentleman of leisure, experienced his moments of keen enjoyment, his tender and romantic interludes; Miss Le Pettit would know decorous wooing, prosperity, pain of giving birth as she duly presented her husband with an heir, sorrow as she saw her chestnut curls greying and her eye gathering the puckers of advancing years around its fading blue. Yet none of these would know as much as Loveday had known in the short life they all thought so wasted and so incomplete, would feel as much as she had felt—the whole pageant of passion symbolised by this insensate strip of satin. She alone had known ecstasy in her brief mad dance across their sylvan stage.
Madgy folded the riband across the half-open eyes and wound the ends about the discoloured throat. And thus it was when Loveday was buried in unconsecrated ground, but with the thing she had desired most in life, striven for, sinned for, and finally attained, still with her. Of whom, after all, could a richer epitaph be written?
THE END.
