Loveday, watching, knew suddenly that, when her time came, she would be an alien in death, as she was in life; that never for her would these costly tokens of respect be gathered.  Yet, instead of this thought humbling her, instead of it teaching her the lesson that only by striving to do her duty in the lowly course set for her could she attain any measure of regard, it aroused in her once more, this time with an even fiercer intensity, her ardent desire to be as different from these good folk as possible.  Miss Le Pettit had thought her different, had admired that difference, and to Miss Le Pettit, as supreme arbiter, her heart turned now.  There was still that doorway to her future whose latch the fair Flora’s hand could lift, and this door, ajar for her, would open wide if she were but fitly garbed to pass across its threshold.

Watching the funeral procession, which should have suggested such far other thoughts even to her undisciplined soul, Loveday was taken only by an idea so rash and impious that it alarmed even herself.  It was the penalty of her dark and ardent blood that fear, like despair, added to the force of her desires.  That idea, which she should have driven from her as a serpent, she nourished in her bosom as though it were a dove.

CHAPTER XI:  IN WHICH LOVEDAY ATTENDS THE FLORA

Chapter XI

IN WHICH LOVEDAY ATTENDS THE FLORA

The eighth of May dawned fair and clear, and from early morning the young men and maidservants of Bugletown, who had Spent the past week cleaning and polishing the houses, streamed out into the country to pluck green branches for their further adornment.  Already the thought of the dance was in their heads, and its tripping in their feet, and they sang through the lanes.

They waylaid strangers coming into Bugletown and drew contributions of silver from them, according to custom, and all they did went to a gay measure.  By the time the gentry, both of the place itself and of outlying regions, were assembled for the dance every house in the main streets of the grey little old town was decked with boughs, its front and back doors opened wide for the dancers, who at the Flora always danced through every house set hospitably open for their passage.

The band, that all day long plays but the one tune, hour after hour, was gathered together by noon, sleek and not yet heated, their trumpets shining in the sun, their fiddles glossy as their well-oiled hair, their big drum round as the portly figure of the bandmaster himself.  Already, in many a bedchamber, young women had twirled this way and that before the mirror, studying the set of taffetas and tarletan, or young men had polished their high beavers anxiously against the sleeves of their brightest broadcloth frock coats.  In speckless kitchens housewives prepared their cakes and cream, and the masters saw to the drawing of the cider, and, perhaps, tasted it, to make sure that it had not soured overnight.  And in each heart different words were running to the Flora Day tune, words that suited with each heart’s measure.  The children in the streets sang aloud the doggerel words that long custom has fastened upon the tune:—­