organs; but, as if to avoid committing an injustice, cited parrots as foremost in her affections.  Holding them both to her breast, Emilia thought that she would rescue them from this beating by giving them the money they had to offer for kindness:  but the restlessness of the children suddenly made her a third party to the thought of cakes.  She had no money.  Her heart bled for the poor little hungry, apprehensive creatures.  For a moment she half fancied she had her voice, and looked up at the windows of the pitiless houses with a bold look; but there was a speedy mockery of her thought “You shall listen:  you shall open!” She coughed hoarsely, and then fell into fits of crying.  Her friend the policeman came by and took her arm with a force that he meant to be persuasive; so lifting her and handing her some steps beyond the limit of his beat, with stern directions for her to proceed home immediately.  She obeyed.  Next day she asked her hostess to lend her half-a-crown.  The woman snapped shortly in answer:  “No; the less you have the better.”  Emilia was obliged to abandon her little people.

She was to this extent the creature of mania:  that she could not conceive of a way being open by which she might return to her father and mother, or any of her friends.  It was to her not a matter for her will to decide upon, but simply a black door shut that nothing could displace.  When the week, for which term of shelter she had paid, was ended, her hostess spoke upon this point, saying, more to convince Emilia of the necessity for seeking her friends than from any unkindness:  “Me and my husband can’t go on keepin’ you, you know, my dear, however well’s our meaning.”  Emilia drew the woman toward her with both her lands, softly shaking her head.  She left the house about noon.

It was now her belief that she had probably no more than another day to live, for she was destitute of money.  The thought relieved her from that dreadful fear of the street, and she walked at her own pace, even after dark.  The rumble and the rattle of wheels; the cries and grinding noises; the hum of motion and talk; all under the lingering smoky red of a London Winter sunset, were not discord to her animated blood.  Her unhunted spirit made a music of them.  It was not like the music of other days, nor was the exultation it created at all like happiness:  but she at least forgot herself.  Voices came in her ear, and hung unheard until long after the speaker had passed.  Hunger did not assail her.  She was not beset by an animal weakness; and having in her mind no image of death, and with her ties to life cut away;—­thus devoid of apprehension or regret, she was what her quick blood made her, for the time.  She recognized that, for one near extinction, it was useless to love or to hate:  so Wilfrid and Lady Charlotte were spared.  Emilia thought of them both with a sort of equanimity; not that any clear thought filled her brain through that delirious night.  The intoxicating music raged there at one level depression, never rising any scale, never undulating ever so little, scarcely changing its barbarous monotony of notes.  She had no power over it.  Her critical judgement would at another moment have shrieked at it.  She was moved by it as by a mechanical force.