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

Chapter IX

IN WHICH LOVEDAY SEES ONE MAGPIE

Upon May Day, when boys blow the May ho