Salome and the Head

Edmund Templar is visiting some relatives before being shipped off to the war in South Africa. Wandering in the New Forest, he encounters a strange girl dancing in a clearing, to the music of a penny whistle played by a crippled boy. Eight years later, on his return from the war, he traces the girl, now a young woman, and her musician, and gets deeply involved in their strange history and their stranger future.
Edith Nesbit's story is strongly coloured by society's constraints on the lives of women, and by love and by death. (Summary by Peter Yearsley.)