iband 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.

End of Project Gutenberg's The White Riband, by Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse

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