rough sea, and her staring at 'en like
one stricken, as she was poor sawl, sure enough. Eh, it was sent for a
sign to her, and a true sign, for that avenen' her man was drowned on
his way to her, with his fine cargo of oil and onions and all. And there
was the cream heavin' in waves for a sign of the rough seas that took
him, though wi' us the skies was fair and the water in the bay as smooth
as silk."

A story that filled simple souls in kitchens with awe, but naturally was
treated more scornfully in drawing-rooms, where it was felt that signs
and portents would hardly be sent to inform a cottage girl of the death
of an onion-seller. For, after all, that is what he amounts to, and the
horrid secret is out.... An onion-seller ... the very words stink in
the nostrils and are fatal to romance.

Fatal to romance in the minds of the fastidious, fatal to respectability
in those of the common people, for only foreigners sold onions. Strange
men with rings in their ears and long, dark curls like a woman's, and an
eye that was at once bold and soft.

Loveday the younger had that eye, save that it had never learned from
life to be bold, and her face was milken white instead of showing the
blown roses of the other girls, though the back of her slender neck was
stained a faint golden brown as by the inherited memories of sun. She
was most immodestly "different," and even the Vicar's lady, who had
charitably seen to her baptism, had difficulty in bringing herself to
believe the girl could be a Christian.

Cherry and Primrose stared up at her as she stood with the red jar in
her hand, and, seeing her look so black, so white, so thin, they leant
their yellow heads together and drew their two aprons closely over their
plump laps.

Seen thus, fronted by Loveday, they seemed amazingly alike, because of
the completeness of her differing, yet a longer look showed that, in
spite of their sleek, fair heads and rounded shoulders, there was
between them the deepest division there can be between women.

Cherry was a maid, thoughtless, blowsy, still untouched enough for
wonder; Primrose had been a wife, though only seventeen, these three
months; in another three was to be a mother. Her eyes, blue as her
friend's, showed an even greater assurance, because it was based on
positives and not on a mere negation. Dark-circled as those eyes were,
her glance, as it passed over Loveday, was the more merciless, because
it came from behind the she