"You and your fal-lals!" she exclaimed; "here's a fine boutigo to make of a parcel of ribands and laces that'll make you look like a couple of the puppets at Corpus Fair. If you wear such as those to the Flora you'll be mistook for a Maypole, and folk'll dance round you." "Well, folks 'ull never dance even _round_ you, unless you're burnt as a guy in a bonfire, let alone dancing _with_ you, Loveday Strick," rejoined Primrose, "and so you do very well knaw, and that's why your heart's sick against us." A minute ago, and that had been true; it was for her isolation Loveday had raged, but when she had seen these two draw their aprons over their girl's treasures, she had not guessed those possessions aright. What she had imagined in her girl's heart, knowing Primrose's condition, it is not for us to pry at; whatever it was, it was so swift, so born of instinct, as to be holy. But when she saw the crumpled finery, she was suddenly too much of a child again to rate it worth envy. The things that Primrose, all unthinking, stood for, the things of warm hearth and hallowed bed that her house had never known, might have power to draw the woman out in her all too soon, but the things that merely charm the feminine still left her chill. She laughed, all the sting gone, when she saw what a milliner's paradise it was from which she was kept out, and put her foot on the first step of the stile. "By your lave, Cherry Cotton!" she said, and swung lightly over, balancing her jar, while they still stared at the change in her. CHAPTER III: IN WHICH SHE FOR THE FIRST TIME FEELS AS A GIRL Chapter III IN WHICH SHE FOR THE FIRST TIME FEELS AS A GIRL Primrose Lear was wife to the son of old Farmer Lear, of Upper Farm, whither Loveday was bound. Willie Lear, the young man, was gay and handsome, and generally off on any and every job that took him abroad, from buying a pig to selling his own senses for a few mugs of cider. Farmer Lear was usually out in the fields, and Mrs. Lear, wrinkled like a winter apple and tuneful as a winter robin, was as a rule alone in the big kitchen or cool dairy, for small help did her daughter-in-law give her about the house. To-day, however, Mrs. Lear was in the parlour, and no less a personage than Miss Le Pettit of Ignores was seated on the best horsehair armchair, her bonneted head, with its drooping feather, leaning gracefully against the lace antimacassar, and her small prunella boots elegantly crossed on the smiling cheeks of the beadwork cherub that adorned the footstool, and that seemed to be puffing the harder, as though to try and puff those little feet up to the heaven where he belonged, trusting to his wings (of the best pearl beads) to bear him after her. Loveday paused, stricken, not with embarrassment, but with awe, upon the threshold. Sight of Cherry and Primrose had deepened her sense of her own isolation and her pain. Sight of Miss Le Pettit made her forget all save what she saw.