respectable--and respectful--way, held its courts of justice, Loveday's
story was referred to with a slight difference. She had become a "young
besom," and her crime was what you might have expected from the bye-blow
of an ear-ringed foreigner, who bowed down to idols instead of the laws
of God and the British Constitution.

In her own little seaport and the farms of the countryside, Loveday
descended lower still--she became a "faggot." Thus from one born to
wield a broom we see how she descended, with the declination in scale of
the chatterboxes, to the broom itself, and from that to the rough
material for it. Which things are a parable, could one but fit the moral
to them as neatly as did everyone who discussed Loveday, in whatever
terms, fit the due warning on to her tale.

And this moral, for all who ran, but more particularly for those who
danced, to read, was as follows:--

It all came of wanting things above your station.

"How simply does your sex dispose of the problems of life, ma'am,"
replied Mr. Constantine to Miss Flora Le Pettit, the heiress of Ignores
Manor, when she supplied him with this moral as an epitaph oh the
affair. Miss Le Pettit smiled on him amiably, but arched her already
springing brows as well, for though everyone knew Mr. Constantine was
reputed clever, there were the gravest doubts about his orthodoxy.

"Problems of life, Mr. Constantine?" she demanded. "Surely over-fine
words to apply to the crazy acts of a village girl deranged in her
intellects." She would have added: "And a nameless one at that," if
she had not remembered (what, in truth, she was never in danger of