"Leave it her," said Mr. Constantine curtly.
"Ay," answered Madgy, speaking freely as was her wont, for she was,
alas, no respecter of persons, "it was more than a white riband to the
maid, for all that the fools say."
Mr. Constantine nodded. He too saw in that length of satin, now soiled
and crumpled, more than a white riband. He saw passion in it--passion
of hope, of ambition, of love, of adoration, of despair. Not a piece
of finery had ended Loveday's stormy course, but a symbol of life
itself, with more in its stained warp and woof than many lives hold
in three-score years and ten. Like religion, this riband held every
experience. Primrose had known mating and childbearing, anxiety and
content and jealousy and death; Mr. Constantine had, in his wandering
life of the gentleman of leisure, experienced his moments of keen
enjoyment, his tender and romantic interludes; Miss Le Pettit would know
decorous wooing, prosperity, pain of giving birth as she duly presented
her husband with an heir, sorrow as she saw her chestnut curls greying
and her eye gathering the puckers of advancing years around its fading
blue. Yet none of these would know as much as Loveday had known in the
short life they all thought so wasted and so incomplete, would feel as
much as she had felt--the whole pageant of passion symbolised by this
insensate strip of satin. She alone had known ecstasy in her brief mad
dance across their sylvan stage.
Madgy folded the riband across the half-open eyes and wound the ends
about the discoloured throat.
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