Haply at that moment the girl was intensely susceptible, for she chilled 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 all; willing that the talker overhead should deceive others, and herself likewise, if possible.  Emilia found her hands acting daintily and critically in the attirement of her person; and then surprised herself murmuring:  “I forgot that Tracy won’t be here to-night.”  By which she betrayed that she had divined those arts she was to shine in, according to Tracy; and betrayed that she had a terrible fear of a loss of all else.  It pained her now that Tracy should not be coming.  “Can I send for him?” she thought, as she looked winningly into the glass, trying to feel what sort of a feeling it was to be in love with a face like that one fronting her, so familiar in its aspects, so strange when scrutinized studiously!  She drew a chair, and laying her elbow on the toilet-table, gazed hard, until the thought:  “What face did Wilfrid see last?” (meaning, “when he saw me last”) drove her away.