Emilia had cried it out to herself almost aloud, on the journey from Devon to London.  The landscape slipping under her eyes, with flashing grey pools and light silver freshets, little glades, little copses, farms, and meadows rounding away to spires of village churches under blue hills, would not let her sink, heavy as was the spirit within her, and dead to everything as she desired to be.  Here, a great strange old oak spread out its arms and seemed to hold the hurrying train a minute.  When gone by, Emilia thought of it as a friend, and that there, there, was the shelter and thick darkness she had hoped she might be flying to.  Or the reach of a stream was seen, and in the middle of it one fair group of clouds, showing distance beyond distance in colour.  Emilia shut her sight, and tried painfully to believe that there were no distances for her.  This was an easy task when the train stopped.  It was surprising to her then why the people moved.  The whistle of the engine and rush of the scenery set her imagination anew upon the horror of being motionless.

“My voice!  I have my voice!” The exclamation recurred at intervals, as a quick fear, that bubbled up from blind sensation, of her being utterly abandoned, and a stray thing carrying no light, startled her.  Darkness she still had her desire for; but not to be dark in the darkness.  She looked back on the recent night as a lake of fire, through which she had plunged; and of all the faculties about her, memory had suffered most, so that it could recall no images of what had happened, but lay against its black corner a shuddering bundle of nerves.  The varying fields and woods and waters offering themselves to her in the swiftness, were as wine dashed to her lips, which could not be dead to it.  The wish to be of some worth began a painful quickening movement.  At first she could have sobbed with the keen anguish that instantaneously beset her.  For—­“If I am of worth, who looks on me?” was her outcry, and the darkness she had previously coveted fell with the strength of a mace on her forehead; but the creature’s heart struggled further, and by-and-by in despite of her the pulses sprang a clear outlook on hope.  It struck through her like the first throb of a sword-cut.  She tried to blind herself to it; the face of hope was hateful.

This conflict of the baffled spirit of youth with its forceful flood of being continued until it seemed that Emilia was lifted through the fiery circles into daylight; her last cry being as her first:  “I have my voice!”

Of that which her voice was to achieve for her she never thought.  She had no thought of value, but only an eagerness to feel herself possessor of something.  Wilfrid had appeared to her to have taken all from her, until the recollection of her voice made her breathe suddenly quick and deep, as one recovering the taste of life.