ing 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
ha