to this dance on the green."

She ascended to her bedroom and dressed herself with scrupulous care.
To an onlooker her beauty would have made her feelings almost
seem reasonable. The gloomy corner into which accident as much as
indiscretion had brought this woman might have led even a moderate
partisan to feel that she had cogent reasons for asking the Supreme
Power by what right a being of such exquisite finish had been placed
in circumstances calculated to make of her charms a curse rather than a
blessing.

It was five in the afternoon when she came out from the house ready
for her walk. There was material enough in the picture for twenty new
conquests. The rebellious sadness that was rather too apparent when she
sat indoors without a bonnet was cloaked and softened by her outdoor
attire, which always had a sort of nebulousness about it, devoid of
harsh edges anywhere; so that her face looked from its environment as
from a cloud, with no noticeable lines of demarcation between flesh and
clothes. The heat of the day had scarcely declined as yet, and she went
along the sunny hills at a leisurely pace, there being ample time for
her idle expedition. Tall ferns buried her in their leafage whenever her
path lay through them, which now formed miniature forests, though not
one stem of them would remain to bud the next year.

The site chosen for the village festivity was one of the lawnlike oases
which were occasionally, yet not often, met with on the plateaux of the
heath district. The brakes of furze and fern terminated abruptly round
the margin, and the grass was unbroken. A green cattletrack skirted the
spot, without, however, emerging from the screen of fern, and this path
Eustacia followed, in order to reconnoitre the group before joining it.
The lusty notes of the East Egdon band had directed her unerringly, and
she now beheld the musicians themselves, sitting in a blue wagon with
red wheels scrubbed as bright as new, and arched with sticks, to which
boughs and flowers were tied. In front of this was the grand central
dance of fifteen or twenty couples, flanked by minor dances of inferior
individuals whose gyrations were not always in strict keeping with the
tune.

The young men wore blue and white rosettes, and with a flush on their
faces footed it to the girls, who, with the excitement and the exercise,
blushed deeper than the pink of their numerous ribbons. Fair ones with
long curls, fair ones with short curls,