love-child, there were plenty of them in the village, but
their parents generally married later, and even if they did not, then
the female partner in crime would be one of the unmentionable women
about whom other people talk so much.... She would live by the harbour
plying a trade which allowed her to have a love-child or so without it
being an occasion for undue remark, or, if she did not descend to those
depths where no one expects anything better and censure consequently
ceases through ineffectiveness, then at least everyone knew the author
of her fall to be an honest, loutish Englishman, no worse than most of
his neighbours.

Loveday was without either of these two rights to existence. Her mother
had been a respectable girl till her fall, and, as far as anyone was
aware, since, for she had died of the fruit of her guilty connection,
and though her portion was doubtless hell-fire, there is nothing to
show that one cannot keep respectable even under such disquieting
circumstances. The elder Loveday had clung obstinately to her
self-respect under circumstances which her neighbours had tried to
render nearly as trying on earth. She had died, as she had lived,
impenitent and only crying for the foreigner who had seduced her,
while he was then lying, had she but known it, in the lap of his first
mistress, the sea, who, perhaps from jealousy at his straying, had taken
him forcibly into her embrace on the same night that Loveday the younger
was born.

Old Madgy, the midwife, who was also more than suspected of being
somewhat of a witch, declared that the expectant mother _did_ know
it--that she had been made aware, through a supernatural happening, of
the loss of her lover, and that that was why the babe saw the light in
such undue haste, and the mother took her departure almost as swiftly
to that place where alone she could ever hope to rejoin him. For, as
evening drew on, Madgy, having called to see how Loveday did, though
nothing was thought of yet for a clear week, found her in the dairy
(the Stricks had not yet fallen on that poverty which came to their roof
under Aunt Senath's shrewish management) standing as one wisht beside
the great red earthen pan of scalded cream.

"And 'ee can b'lieve me or no as it like 'ee, my dears," old Madgy would
say to many a breathless circle in a farm kitchen during the intervals
of her duties overstairs, "but there was the cream in the pan a-heavin'
up an' down in gurt waves, like a