by his side; and when he left her she begged Madame to walk fast. "I
wonder whether I have a cold!" she said.

Madame explained all the signs of it with tragic minuteness, deciding
that Emilia was free at present, and by miracle, from this English
scourge; but Emilia kept her hands at her mouth. Over the hornbeam hedge
of the lane that ran through the market-gardens, she could see a murky
sunset spreading its deep-coloured lines, that seemed to her really like
a great sorrowing over earth. It had never seemed so till now; and,
entering the house, the roar of vehicles in a neighbouring road sounded
like something implacable in the order of things among us, and clung
about her ears pitilessly. Running upstairs, she tried a scale of notes
that broke on a cough. "Did I cough purposely?" she asked herself; but
she had not the courage to try the notes again. While dressing she
hummed a passage, and sought stealthily to pass the barrier of her own
watchfulness by dwelling on a deep note, from which she was to rise
bursting with full bravura energy, and so forth on a tide of song. But
her breath failed. She stared into the glass and forced the note. A
panic caught at her heart when she heard the sound that issued. "Am I
ill? I must be hungry!" she exclaimed. "It is a cough! But I don't
cough! What is the matter with me?"

Under these auspices she forced her voice again, and subsequently
loosened her dress, complaining of the dressmaker's affection for
tightness. "Now," she said, having fallen upon an attempt at simple "do,
re, me, fa," and laughed at herself. Was it the laugh, that stopping her
at "si," made that "si" so husky, asthmatic, like the wheezing of a
crooked old witch? "I am unlucky, to-night," said Emilia. Or, rather,
so said her surface-self. The submerged self--self in the depths--rarely
speaks to the occasions, but lies under calamity quietly apprehending