IN WHICH THE READER IS TAKEN BACK A FEW WEEKS IN POINT OF TIME, AND DOWN
SEVERAL STEPS IN THE SOCIAL SCALE


It was on a balmy day in early Spring that Loveday had first met Miss Le
Pettit. Loveday had gone to fetch the milk. For Loveday's aunt, Senath
Strick, with whom she lived, was a shiftless, unthrifty woman, never
able to keep prosperous enough to own a cow for as long as the beast
took between calvings, and the times when Loveday had a fragrant,
soft-eyed animal to cherish were mercifully rare. Mercifully, for
Loveday, though she appeared sullen, had ever more sensibility than was
good for one in her position, and each time Aunt Senath was forced to
sell the cow, Loveday behaved as though she had as good a right to sit
and cry herself silly as any young lady with whom nothing was more
urgent than to spoil fine cambric with salt water.

This, then, was a period of poverty with the Strick family, and Loveday
was sent to fetch the evening milk from the farm at the crest of the
hill. On the way, she came upon Cherry Cotton and Primrose Lear, seated
upon a granite stile, their heads together over something Cherry held in
her lap. Cherry heard approaching footsteps, and whipped her apron over
the object she and her friend had been so busily discussing. Loveday was
hurt rather than angered by the unkind action, for there was a reason,
connected with Primrose, why she had felt a tender curiosity as to what
the two girls were guarding so closely. Yet she was aware of bitterness
also--for it was ever so when she appeared. Maids ceased their gossip,
boys laughed and pointed after her. She was "different."

Not in being a love-child, there were plenty of them in the village, but
their parents generally married later, and even if they did not, then