Her seat was under trees, between a man and a woman who slanted from her with hidden chins.  The chilly dry leaves began to waken, and the sky showed its grey.  Hunger had become as a leaden ball in Emilia’s chest.  She could have eaten eagerly still, but she had no ravenous images of food.  Nevertheless, she determined to beg for bread at a baker’s shop.  Coming into the empty streets again, the dread of exposing her solitary wretchedness and the stains of night upon her, kept her back.  When she did venture near the baker’s shop, her sensation of weariness, want of washing, and general misery, made her feel a contrast to all other women she saw, that robbed her of the necessary effrontery.  She preferred to hide her head.

The morning hours went in this conflict.  She was between-whiles hungry and desperate, or stricken with shame.  Fatigue, bringing the imperious necessity for rest, intervened as a relief.  Emilia moaned at the weary length of the light, but when dusk fell and she beheld flame in the lamps, it seemed to be too sudden and she was alarmed.  Passive despair had set in.  She felt sick, though not weak, and the thought of asking help had gone.

A street urchin, of the true London species, in whom excess of woollen comforter made up for any marked scantiness in the rest of his attire, came trotting the pavement, pouring one of the favourite tunes of his native metropolis through the tube of a penny-whistle, from which it did not issue so disguised but that attentive ears might pronounce it the royal march of the Cannibal Islands.  A placarded post beside a lamp met this musician’s eye; and, still piping, he bent his knees and read the notification.  Emilia thought of the Hillford and Ipley clubmen, the big drum, the speeches, the cheers, and all the wild strength that lay in her that happy morning.  She watched the boy piping as if he were reading from a score, and her sense of humour was touched.  “You foolish boy!” she said to herself softly.  But when, having evidently come to the last printed line, the boy rose and pocketed his penny-whistle, Emilia was nearly laughing.  “That’s because he cannot turn over the leaf,” she said, and stood by the post till long after the boy had disappeared.  The slight emotion of fun had restored to her some of her lost human sensations, and she looked about for a place where to indulge them undisturbed.  One of the bridges was in sight She yearned for the solitude of the wharf beside it, and hurried to the steps.  To descend she had to pass a street-organ and a small figure bent over it.  “Sei buon’ Italiano?” she said.  The answer was a surly “Si.”  Emilia cried convulsively “Addio!” Her brain had become on a sudden vacant of a thought, and all she knew was that she descended.

CHAPTER XLI

“Sei buon’ Italiana?”

Across what chasm did the words come to her?

It seemed but a minutes and again many hours back, that she had asked that question of a little fellow, who, if he had looked up and nodded would have given her great joy, but who kept his face dark from her and with a sullen “Si” extinguished her last feeling of a desire for companionship with life.