Despair, I have said before, is a wilful business, common to corrupt blood, and to weak woeful minds:  native to the sentimentalist of the better order.  The only touch of it that came to Emilia was when she attempted to penetrate to Wilfrid’s reason for calling her down to Devon that he might renounce and abandon her.  She wanted a reason to make him in harmony with his acts, and she could get none.  This made the world look black to her.  But, “I have my voice!” she said, exhausted by the passion of the night, tearless, and only sensible to pain when the keen swift wind, and the flying squares of field and meadow prompted her nature mysteriously to press for healthy action.

A man opposite to her ventured a remark:  “We’re going at a pretty good pace now, miss.”

She turned her eyes to him, and the sense of speed was reduced in her at once, she could not comprehend how.  Remembering presently that she had not answered him, she said:  “It is because you are going home, perhaps, that you think it fast.”

“No, miss,” he replied, “I’m going to market.  They can’t put on steam too stiff for me when I’m bound on business.”

Emilia found it impossible to fathom the sensations of the man, and their common desire for speed bewildered her more.  She was relieved when the train was lightened of him.  Soon the skirts of red vapour were visible, and when the guard took poor Braintop’s return-ticket from her petulant hand, all of the journey that she bore in mind was the sight of a butcher-boy in blue, with a red cap, mounted on a white horse, who rode gallantly along a broad highroad, and for whom she had struck out some tune to suit the measure of his gallop.

She accepted her capture by the Marinis more calmly than Merthyr had been led to suppose.  The butcher-boy’s gallop kept her senses in motion for many hours, and that reckless equestrian embodied the idea of the vivifying pace from which she had dropped.  He went slower and slower.  By degrees the tune grew dull, and jarred; and then Emilia looked out on the cold grey skies of our autumn, the rain and the fogs, and roaring London filled her ears.  So had ended a dream, she thought.  She would stand at the window listening to street-organs, whose hideous discord and clippings and drawls did not madden her, and whose suggestion of a lovely tune rolled out no golden land to her.  That treasure of her voice, to which no one in the house made allusion, became indeed a buried treasure.

In the South-western suburb where the Marinis lived, plots of foliage were to be seen, and there were lanes not so black but that they showed the hues of the season.  These led to the parks and to noble gardens.  Emilia daily went out to keep the dying colours of the year in view, and walked to get among the trees, where, with Madame attendant on her, she sat counting the leaves as each one curved, and slid, and spun to earth, or on a gust of air hosts went aloft; but it